- I want to talk about religious scepticism as a subject for debate
in the poetry of the years just before and after Waterloo. More specifically,
I want to talk about the very interested debate over scepticism between
the period's most popular male and female poets, Lord Byron and Felicia
Hemans (Hemans's dates are 1793 - 1835). I'll approach this by talking
first about historical context and its material effects on these poets
and their work; second about the political and cultural terms that encode
and ultimately destabilize this debate: empire and republic, Hellenism
and Orientalism; third about the debate itself, where the poets' interested
positions play themselves out in cultural and intertextual terms. While
Byron is concerned for the sacrifice of young men at the altar of orthodox
belief as sanctioned by belief in an afterlife, Hemans is concerned
for the sacrifice of women and children at the altar of scepticism about
that belief. I'd like to suggest, however, that taken together, these
poets offer a scepticism that can become their culture's well-founded
disbelief about itself.
- First, the historical moment of Waterloo and its power to shape the
careers of these two best-selling poets in very parallel ways: Byron's
and Hemans's careers alike were launched and fostered by Whig opposition
to the Napoleonic Wars; likewise, their middle-period work was published
by the officially Tory John Murray. It was Murray's correspondence with
the exiled Byron and his book mailings to the poet that promoted the
textual relationship between Hemans and Byron that would culminate in
the 1820 battle over scepticism. In 1816, for instance, Murray published
Hemans's first adult volume, The Restoration of the Works of Art
to Italy; Byron writes that he will carry it into Italy with him
and that it is "a good poem—very" (Byron's Letters
and Journals 5: 108). Childe Harold 4 cements the consensus
between the poets in favor of Italian republicanism, and it also borrows
from Hemans's poem the large female figurations of personal and political
grief and hope. Waterloo, however, put an end to a Whig opposition which
had nourished the republican poems of both poets, and Tory consensus-building
came instead to dominate political language and the politicized press.
- Post-war changes put pressure on these poets' domestic as well as
professional lives, handing them oddly similar marital separations (Hemans's
in 1818): in each case, the husbands decamp for affordable Italy and
the wives stay behind in Britain to manage family. Captain Hemans was
literally demobilized by Waterloo, Byron culturally so. The press's
post-war attacks on Byron as a dangerous moral and religious sceptic
were part of Tory consensus-building, and Hemans's growing participation
in these attacks paid bills for her and, as well, expressed her reading
of history's liability for the widows and orphans that it makes. Both
husbands, then, were in flight from their Tory-enlisted wives and the
financial liabilities that (in Hemans's case, with five sons to be educated)
mandated that enlistment. Hemans soon was writing under the sponsorship
of Tory literati associated with the Quarterly Review, especially
Reginald Heber and H.H. Milman.
- Second, the historical and cultural terms in which the debate over
scepticism took place: As Elie Halévy has so well shown (in The
Liberal Awakening), the moment 1815 to 1820 was bracketed in the
terms empire and republic, in 1815 the defeat of one
empire and the ascendancy of another, in 1820 the anti-imperial revolts
in the Mediterranean that called on Britain to declare itself as either
republican or imperial (or—both). In their Italianate poems, Hemans
and Byron had concurred over the part that Italian republicanism should
play in guiding Britain's post-war governance. In their subsequent conflict
over matters of scepticism and faith, they were, in effect, debating
which ideology could best inform a post-war, post-imperial republic.
- This is not the place to discuss in detail the Carbonari and Risorgimento
movements that flowed from these poets' engagement with Italianate republicanism.
I have covered that elsewhere (in The Bowl of Liberty), where
I locate the Risorgimento transnationally and illustrate its motility
in Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Felicia Hemans's
"The Voice of Spring." But it is worth noting that The
Sceptic alludes to Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon whose
hero is François de Bonnivard, a Genevan republican imprisoned
by the Duke of Savoy,
He, who hath pin'd in dungeons, midst the shade
Of such deep night as man for man hath made,
Thro' lingering years; if call'd at length to be,
Once more, by nature's boundless charter, free,
Shrinks feebly back, the blaze of noon to shun,
Fainting at day, and blasted by the sun!
(Go to The Sceptic,
line 165)
- Hemans thus reminds Byron of the republican topos they shared, Swiss
resistance to external conquest (see her "The League of the Alps"
and the "Song of the Battle of Morgarten").
- If, Switzerland and Italy serve the post-Waterloo period as sites
of Risorgimento plots and politics, Greece becomes the site of debate
over republican ideology—over matters, that is, of scepticism and
faith—a Greece which is culturally both Hellenic and Orientalist.
Scepticism and syncretism alike are the Romantic results of this engagement
with Greece; I discuss Hemans's experiment with syncretism elsewhere
(Go
to Romantic Circles Praxis Series essay) and speak only of scepticism
here. Clearly, Byron adopts Athens and the Acropolis as his iconic site
in these matters—the site where the deliberative practices that
might renew European and British republicanism were modeled by Socratic
scepticism. Just as clearly, Hemans contests the recoverability of the
Athenian model. For both poets, in any case, material desires and interests
always subject the discourse of Greek republicanism to Orientalist displacement
and reversal. The result is that Byron's and Hemans's positions on scepticism
are always produced by culturally-crossed sites: for Byron, an Athens
always under Orientalist (Hellenistic or Muslim) degradation; and for
Hemans, a Jerusalem whose Hebraic orthodoxy is always being reconstituted
as a deliberative (Italian or Greek) city-state.
- Third, the interested and culturally-mediated arguments that make
up Byron's and Hemans's debate over religious scepticism: texts to be
discussed include Byron's The Curse of Minerva which declares
the Athenian Hellenism (and which is reprised in Childe Harold
2) and Hemans's 1817 Modern Greece which undermines that construction.
They include Byron's Childe Harold 2 and "The Destruction
of Sennacherib" which experiment in Hellenic scepticism under pressure
from Orientalist or Hebraic faith and Hemans's 1819 "Heliodorus
in the Temple" and 1820 The Sceptic which recover Hebraic
orthodoxy but recast it in terms of Mediterranean republicanism.
- Briefly, The Curse of Minerva early celebrates the sceptical
Socrates as Athena's "Wisest son," "Him that scorned
to fear or fly,/ Who lived and died as none can live or die"—and
late puts the republican question to a wartime Britain whose deliberations
are failing for lack of such "wise sons": "Then in the
Senates of your sinking state/ Show me the man whose counsels may have
weight." Byron's poem of course uses the perfidious plundering
of the Acropolis by Lord Elgin to represent Britain's betrayal of republicanism.
In her anonymous 1817 Modern Greece, Hemans adopts the same
iconography in order to make a sceptical point of her own about Byron's
reification of Athens. Her Greece is pointedly a leveled and commercial
"modern" one, its Acropolis a pastel-penciled representation,
its Athens possible now in Britain if anywhere. Byron fired off several
put-downs of this poem in a letter to Murray, including that there is
no "modern Greece" (LBJ 5: 263).
- Canto 2 (in stanzas 1-9) of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage codifies
Greece as the site of religious scepticism for Byron (Go
to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage ~Canto 2). It also reveals
that this scepticism comes in the service of Byron's commitment to young
men and their fortunes and that it can be undone by that same interest.
Orthodoxies may change, the passage says, but always they sacrifice
their own, either the lives of young men (in war and under repression)
or their desires (especially the homoerotic ones that underlie the canto's
stanza 9). Stanza 7 contends that, with his sceptic motto "All
that we know is, nothing can be known," "Athena's wisest son"
Socrates has removed the linchpin from such coercive orthodoxy, the
belief in an afterlife. Yet Stanza 8 already begins the undoing of Socrates's
scepticism by his suspect followers, "the Sadducee and sophists"
who are "madly vain of dubious lore." Phantom-like, theirs
corrupts Socratic scepticism, but so does the masculine desire that
all along has underwritten scepticism's defense of young men against
orthodox enlistment. The grief that Byron will express in stanza 9 over
Edleston has already led him to entertain a "Yet if' about the
afterlife—'Yet if . . . there be/ A land of Souls beyond that sable
shore."
- Hemans's Modern Greece has excised Byron's Socrates from
history; and in her "Heliodorus" and The Sceptic,
she moves to attack his "madly vain" followers, the Sadducees
and sophists whose "dubious" company the desiring Byron himself
has joined. In a Hellenism that would be deliberative and republican,
she suggests, these figures form a singularly predatory and self-confounding
crew of imperial hangers-on.
- In her 1819 "Heliodorus in the Temple" (from Tales and
Historic Scenes) Hemans displaces Socratic Athens with Maccabean
Jerusalem as a model city-state and displaces Byron's treatment of youth
and sacrifice with her own, differently gendered, version of the same,
appropriately written in Venus and Adonis stanzas. Hemans's is a Jerusalem
with a difference, a city-state resistant to empire, a temple state
to be sure yet one committed, not to the sacrifice of the young, but
the protection of widows and orphans. Hemans depicts Maccabean Jerusalem
as a republic in struggle against the Seleucid empire. This anti-imperial
struggle takes place internally as well as externally, because Hellenized
Jews known as Sadducees plunder the Temple's treasury to pay for their
imperial luxuries. Worldly, educated, sceptical, they promote gymnasium
education and eschew such religious innovations as belief in personal
immortality and apocalyptic sanctions. These they leave to the newer
zealot faction, the Pharisees.
- For "Heliodorus in the Temple," Hemans chooses her text
from the Pharisitical second book of Maccabees (chapter 3),
in which the Sadducee Heliodorus comes to Jerusalem's temple with an
imperial decree to raid its treasury "committed of trust."
Pressing her materially interested case, Hemans clarifies that in this
treasury "are laid/ The orphan's portion, and the widow's store."
Neither wailing women nor ranks of priests can stop Heliodorus "the
spoiler" from violating temple sanctuary, so well trained is he
as a Greek sceptic. So a Pharisitical innovation must prevent him instead,
an apocalyptic horse and rider that smite "th'oppressor" down.
In visiting this sanction on the corrupt sceptic, Hemans boldly borrows
from Byron's own Hebraic avenger in "The Destruction of Sennacherib."
Asking for the "Angel of God! that through th'Assyrian host . .
.Didst pass triumphant in avenging power," she alludes to Byron's
1815 "Hebrew Melody."
- In her 1820 pamphlet poem The Sceptic, Hemans shifts her
target from an ancient Sadducee to "the Sophists" of contemporary
British culture (Go to The
Sceptic, line 1). Dressing her "cold Sceptic"/"cold
Sophist" in Petrarchan and Promethean trappings and alluding freely
to Byron's biography, Hemans leaves little doubt that her target is
Byron (and, by association, Shelley). The Quarterly Review
indeed praises this poem as a force against "the most dangerous
writer of the present day" (October 1820; the reviewer, John Taylor
Coleridge). This poem in 550 lines of running pentameter couplets is
indeed a sustained polemic against Byronic scepticism on temporal and
theological grounds, one spliced with ad hominem attacks yet
also graced with sisterly concern for this poet who spurns "a brighter
state" for a "quicksand" earth. Still concerned for those
at risk from historical accident and dependent on the temple's treasury
trust, Hemans here focuses on the sanctions that protect or indemnify
that trust, especially the belief in an afterlife. She presses her arguments
in terms of the personal and poetic history that she and Byron share,
using that intertwined history to undo Byron's sceptical position from
within.
- Hemans points early to Byron's separation crisis ("the hour of
wrath,/ When burst th' o'erwhelming vials on thy path") (Go
to The Sceptic, line 269) and her own, suggesting that, had
he let God support him in that personal moment, the world might have
been spared the ever-reproduced Byronic persona, the "ruin'd tenement",
with those showy losses that "we shrink from, vainly to forget."
Death, Hemans reminds the sceptic Promethean, is not played out before
"gazing nations" by a hero who, "undismayed amidst the
tears of all,/. . .folds his mantle, regally to fall." All too
often, in death we are "obscure, and lone"; and our death
is like the falling "light leaf" that a "bears some trembling
insect's little world of cares." For this "lone sufferer,"
belief in an afterlife is belief in the human link that can also be
represented by a deathbed comforter (Go
to The Sceptic, line 451).
- The Sceptic's figure of the deathbed comforter recalls Byron's
own feminine icon of deathbed watch in Childe Harold 4.72,
"Iris," "Like Hope upon a deathbed," the rainbow
bearing "serene/ Its brilliant hues with all their beams unshorn":
"Love watching Madness with unalterable mien." This heroic
comforter, I've argued before, was prompted in Byron by Hemans's own
The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy.
Hemans charges now that Byron has hamstrung this "faithful cherub,"
their shared figure: "Thou hast shorn her plume,/ That might have
raised thee far above the tomb" (Go
to The Sceptic, line 49). Hemans's argument in The Sceptic,
then, presses past the personal sufferings of women and their children
and into the ideological sanctions—like one's "Hope"
for an afterlife—that in some way address or redress those sufferings.
To discount the afterlife is to discount the promises made to women
and their dependents and the ongoing need to address, or enforce them.
Discounting those promises can lead, as in "Heliodorus," to
the raiding of what reserves are available for widows and orphans. If
the material needs of women and their dependents cannot be addressed,
an afterlife might redress them; but in so doing, it would reveal the
tenuous dispensation offered women and children in this life.
- When the sceptic discounts the afterlife, then, he threatens the promises
made to women under a marriage system built on displacement and threatens
the sanctions needed to enforce those promises. The sceptic's "vain
philosophy" thus "mocks" love—mocks, that is, the
promises made to women and to children, a group that after all includes
everyone, including Byron, subject to marital and parental accident.
Would the sceptic himself, then, "dare to love,"
asks Hemans in a challenge that is both ethical and logical (Go
to The Sceptic, line 71).
- In The Sceptic, death is not merely human loss but a fearsome
event, a powerful apocalyptic sanction. Five of The Sceptic's
six footnotes cite an Old Testament God before whom people "flee"
and "tremble" (Go
to The Sceptic, Notes). Like the sanctions against "Heliodorus,"
this death is a "swift pale horse" with a "mighty rider"
that prefigures "the day of terror" or Judgement with its
"final doom." Hemans's poem begins to identify this apocalyptic
"Chastener" Death with the God who sends him; and this conflation
leads Hemans into a line of argument that poses its own sceptical questions
about the nature of a death-dealing God: without faith in an afterlife
and the Christ who is its emblem, Hemans asks,
Should we not wither at the Chastener's look,
Should we not sink beneath our God's rebuke,
When o'er our heads the desolating blast,
Fraught with inscrutable decrees, hath passd,
And the stern power who seeks the noblest prey,
Hath call'd our fairest and our best away?
(Go to The Sceptic,
line 461)
- Would we not all be decimated, then, but for the sacrifice in which
Christ has propitiated this Death, this God? If we pause at this characterization
of God, we recognize that this heavenly father exacts the sacrifice
of his son in ways that raise concerns in other texts by Byron and by
Hemans as well (I'm thinking of her The Siege of Valencia,
A Tale of the Secret Tribunal, and The Vespers of Palermo).
In those plots, son-sacrifice is either a cruel instrument of policy
or the fulfillment of a revenge ethic; and in these texts, such sacrifice
is urgently critiqued as a form of nihilism. How different is the God
accepted as orthodox in The Sceptic from these cruel or at
the least hapless fathers?
- It is just after Hemans's portrait of God as Death that she, very
briefly, lifts the veil of her ideology from the world of feminine desire
that it contains. In this disruptive moment, the poem has shifted almost
without notice from the sacrifice of Christ to the loss in 1817 of Princess
Charlotte in childbed; it has turned to a royal daughter whose death
meets no divine design, only "inscrutable decrees." Then,
the poem asks,
Should we not madden, when our eyes behold
All that we lov'd in marble stillness cold, . . .?
But for the promise, all shall yet be well,
Would not the spirit in its pangs rebel,
Beneath such clouds as darken'd, when the hand
Of wrath lay heavy on our prostrate land. . .?
(Go to The Sceptic,
line 457)
It is the death of an unexceptionable mother in service of the state
that brings to the poem's surface such resistant words as "madden"
and "rebel."
- Not surprisingly, just as Hemans had critiqued Byron for shoddiness
and sophistry in The Sceptic, Byron criticized this poem for
its rhetoric ("too stiltified and apostrophic") and its logic
(people died well prior to the Christian dispensation; BLJ 7: 113).
But Byron has already corrupted scepticism with the cynicism of the
Sadducee and sophist and the desire of the lover for reunion. And Hemans
has exposed a killing belief to a very Byronic scepticism about needless
sacrifice. So in the end the sceptical debate engaged both writers in
a broader and more nuanced project about materialism and scepticism.
Arguably, Byron's scepticism had its impact on Hemans, for the cruelty
of sanctions that demand sacrificial death for their fulfillment is
no more lost on her than on him. It could also be argued that in the
event Hemans fields a scepticism more devastating than Byron's: for
while his concerns a hypothetical afterlife, hers concerns the workings
of a very material present one. In her, the Tory and radical positions
on scepticism meet and create a third, critical, perhaps feminist position
that ultimately eludes both sides.
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Works Cited
Byron, Lord. Byron's Letters and Journals. Ed.
Leslie A. Marchand. 12 vols. London: Murray, 1973-1982.
---. The Complete Poetical Works. Eds. Jerome J.
McGann and Barry Weller. 7 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1980-1993.
Halévy, Elie. The Liberal Awakening: 1815-1830.
1923. Trans. E. J. Watkin. New York: Barnes, 1961. Vol. 2 of A History
of the English People in the Nineteenth Century. 6 vols.
Hemans, Felicia. "Heliodorus at the Temple." Felicia
Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Ed. Susan J.
Wolfson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 2000. [p. 148].
Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne. The Sceptic; A Poem.
London: John Murray, 1820. British Women Romantic Poets Project.
Ed. Khosh. Kohler Collection, Shields Library, U of California, Davis,
1998. 23 Dec. 2000. "The Sceptic; A Poem" on British Women Romantic
Poets 1789 - 1832.
Sweet, Nanora. The Bowl of Liberty: Felicia Hemans and
the Romantic Mediterranean. Diss. U of Michigan. 1993.
---. "Hemans, Heber, and Superstition and Revelation:
Experiment and Orthodoxy at the Scene of Writing." Romantic Passions,
ed. Elizabeth Fay. Romantic Praxis Series, Romantic Circles Website;
March 1998.
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