THE term ‘Satanic School’ was first coined by Southey in his preface to a vision of judgment of a poem that came rather heavily upon the younger generation of romanticists Keats, Shelley and Byron.
Southey dubs Byron’s works as “monstrous combination of heroes and mockery, lewdness and impiety”. He criticised these poets for their immorality (in their lives as well as in their works), for they rebelled against the orthodox Christian values and glorified the exotic and the passionate.
Of the three, perhaps Byron was ore satanic, for he was descended from two aristocratic families, notorious for their orthodoxy, violence and dissoluteness. His grandfather was an admiral known as ‘foulweather Jack’. His great-grand uncle was known among his neighbours as the wicked lord and was tried for killing one of his kinsmen. His father was a freak and a fortune hunter who wasted the fortune of two wives. Byron’s mother, Catherine Gorden, was last in the line of lawless Scottish lords. She herself was an ill-educated woman given to the outburst of temper. The mother and the son fought violently when together and missed each other passionately when apart.
Such was the satanic inheritance of our poet, and this satanic inheritance and upbringing characterized his writings, especially his heroes: mad, bad and dangerous. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of Byronic hero — a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious unforgivable past:
There is not a joy the world can give that it takes away
When the glow of early thoughts declines in feelings dull decay
Tis not on youth’s smooth cheek the blush alone which fades so fast
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past
Inspite of his prodigious vogue, Byron has never yet, perhaps had the serious admiration which he deserves. Very few of his serious admirers feel his vital influence, the influence of his splendid and imperishable excellence, of sincerity and strength. He was one of the rare poets whom nothing, not even satisfaction and happiness makes happy. His own aristocratic class drove him to fury; to middle class morals he condemned fiercely and lower class he never bothers to discuss. So much was his hatred for everything, England has ever had, that he says “the only virtue England has is hypocrisy”.
But despite his scathing sarcasm and biting remarks he is taken as taken as the poet who marks change in his age. His chief claim to be an arch romantic is that he provides his age with what Tiane calls its ruling personage that is the model that contemporaries invest with admiration and sympathy. This is where the concept of byronic hero arises. He occurs in many guises in Byron’s romances and dramas but his central and recurrent attribute is that of a satanic, passionate, moody and remorse torn but unrepententant sinner who relies on absolute self against all institutional and moral trammels on the display of individuality.
This figure infusing the arch rebel in a non-political form with a strong erotic interest, gathered together and embodied in implicit yearnings for Byron’s time, was imitated in life as well as in art and helped shape the intellectual as well as cultural history of the 19th century.
Interestingly Byron’s contemporaries insisted on identifying the author with his fictional characters. But Byron’s letters and testimony of his friends show that except for recurrent moods of black depression, his own temperament in many respects was antithesis to that of his heroes. He was passionate and wilful. But when in good humour he could very much be the man of the world in the 18th century style — gregarious, lively, tolerant and witty conversationalist capable of adopting ironic attitude toward his own follies as well as to others.
But if Byronism was largely a fiction, produced by collaboration between Byron’s imagination and that of his public, then the fiction was historically more important the poet in his actual person.
Students of Byron still feel, as his friends have felt, the magnetic attraction of his paradoxical and variable temperament. As Mary Shelley wrote, six years after his death “The Lord Byron I feel is our Lord Byron — the fascinating-faulty-childish-philosophical being-daring the world-docile to a private circle-impetuous and indolent-gloomy and more gay than others”.
Of his inner discordances Byron himself was aware, he told his friend Lady Blessington “I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long — I am such a strange of melange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me”.
Yet he remains faithful to his own code -- a determination to always tell the truth as he saw it about the world and about himself.
What distinguishes him from his contemporaries is his refusal to suppress any of his moods and passionate dedication to liberty as he went on to say to Lady Blessington “There are but two sentiments to which I am constant — a strong love of liberty and a detestation of cant”
THE term ‘Satanic School’ was first coined by Southey in his preface to a vision of judgment of a poem that came rather heavily upon the younger generation of romanticists Keats, Shelley and Byron.
