7 - Hero with a thousand faces: the rhetoric of Byronism

Summary

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.

(Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave)

And feeling, in a poet, is the source

Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,

And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.

(Don Juan, iii, st. 87)

I saw, that is, I dream'd myself

Here—here—even where we are, guests as we were,

Myself a host that deem'd himself but guest,

Willing to equal all in social freedom.

(Sardanapalus, iv, i, 78–81)

We think of Byron as the most personal of poets, recklessly candid, self-revealing to a fault. Like most long-standing literary judgments, this one still strikes home. Nevertheless, its truth involves a paradox best defined by a later English writer who is in many ways Byron's avatar. “Man is least himself,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” Perhaps no English writer, not even Wilde himself, executed this theory of the mask so completely as Byron. “Before Oscar Wilde was, I am.”

Many of Byron's masks are famous, Childe Harold being, I suppose, the most famous of them all – and the prototype of those subsequent masked men we call Byronic Heroes.