Considerably more has been written about Byron's life than about his poetry, and neither of these books seeks to redress the balance. His heroism, charisma and restless intelligence inevitably tempt partisan critics to draw him over on to their own side: Allan Massie wants to make out that Byron was 'more Scottish than English', while Michael Foot more boldly claims him for democratic socialism, pacifism, even feminism - in other words, I suppose, the Labour Party.
Foot has produced a reading of Byron which impresses as polemic but not as criticism. Oddly, he describes his book as 'a vindication'. Why does Byron need vindication? His reputation seems never to have been higher than at present. In the extended 'Aftermath' to his study, Foot spends some time defending Byron against critics such as Macaulay and Kingsley; but their hysterical accusations of 'misanthropy and voluptuousness' and 'shameful self-revealings' seem scarcely worth countering from the perspective of 1988.
Radical in his political thinking, Michael Foot is a fervent traditionalist when it comes to literary history. He believes in continuity and the ahistoricism of critical judgments. He doesn't hesitate to use phrases like 'the greatest English tradition' (referring to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton), and throughout the foot-notes to this book he conducts a clubbish dialogue with his fellow critics, whom he refers to as the 'companions .. who have shepherded me along my path'. We get guided in the direction of 'treasures' and 'delightful volumes'; editions and commentaries are repeatedly 'splendid' and 'indispensable'. The rhetoric of overenthusiasm for the critical canon generated by a whole legion of 'Byron addicts' (Foot's own phrase) becomes rather wearying.
Surprisingly for so combative a thinker, there is precious little real engagement with modern critcs of Byron such as Malcolm Kelsall, whose book Byron's Politics took a very different view of the subject. Foot sets out to smooth over rather than expose Byron's inconsistencies, but as a result he fails to register that wonderful capacity for self-doubt which fuels much of the poetry, and which expresses itself again and again in the letters.
Inconsistency, the inablity or unwillingness to settle on beliefs, was for Byron closely linked with sexual inconstancy (Foot is also at pains to play down his promiscuity and bi-sexuality). He wrote a fine panegyric on inconstancy in Canto II of Don Juan:
'Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull.
This is from the poem which Michael Foot calls 'the greatest anti-war epic in our language', a verdict which will puzzle anyone who comes to it with Byron's famous statement in mind, that it 'is meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing'.
The cumulative impact of sustained, quiet facetiousness can of course be devastating, and perhaps this is indeed how Don Juan works. But Foot seems curiously uninterested in the question - central to his subject - of whether beliefs become modified when expressed poetically. Poetry itself, in Byron's case, was a whole habit of thinking, quite different from political thought but forever impinging upon it. It is never suggested here, though, that his opinions might have been influenced by the verse forms in which he chose to express them, culminating in Don Juan's ottava rima, with its flexible, argumentative build-ups and jokey antitheses.
Foot seems to believe that Byron's political views existed independently of his poetry, which was all a question of spontaneity, inspiration and 'genius': 'He could hardly stop himself from pouring out new stanzas of Don Juan.'
This outmoded view of the relationship between poetry and politics fits in only too well with the tone of the book generally. Far from providing a 'new, modern estimate of Byron', it feels, in its rhetoric and its critical methodology, painfully old-fashioned.
Allan Massie at least has no doubts about Byron's doubts. 'The great Romantic was also a great anti-Romantic ... It is precisely his willingness to accept the limitations of what was possible, and his acceptance of necessity, that proves him a hero.' It seems a sensible conclusion to a sensible book somewhere between an academic study and a travelogue.
Massie is a pleasure to read, and has a line in dry understatement which brings out the sense of fun in some of the episodes ('Byron fell into the Grand Canal one night as he made his way to a rendezvous,' he reports flatly). His account of the political background to the years in Italy is very lucid and thorough. Best of all is the way he has given full weight to the political context while retaining a sense that Byron himself may have been using it opportunistically: in part, at least, as a way of escaping from self-absorption.
In concentrating on Byron's three phases abroad, Massie has set himslef much more modest limits than Michael Foot, but it's a shame that his book has little new to say about the poetry either. 'He thought as a Classicist; he felt as a Romantic' is one of his insights. True: but I feel as though I've seen it on an exam paper before now, followed by the word 'Discuss'.
