One badboy to beat them all

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) is the leper of English Romantic literature. His life was short and tumultuous, defined by his eccentric, scandalous behavior. While his peers Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are still read widely today, Byron’s work has been forgotten outside of the echo chamber that is university humanities departments. And yet, Byron is in many ways greater than all of his contemporaries, as the persona he projected through his poems and personalities has shaped Western culture in profound ways. Byron was the greatest seducer of his time, and his life and work provides invaluable insights for students of game.

David Goldman, when he was still writing as “Spengler,” published the following in his review of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption:

“Learn Greek, dear reader, and throw my translation into the fire!” wrote the first German translator of Homer’s Iliad, Count von Stolberg, words that Franz Rosenzweig placed as a superscript to the preface for his own translation of the medieval Hebrew poet, Judah Halevi.

Read Franz Rosenzweig, I should like to say, and hit the delete key, for the 100-and-a-score essays I have published in this space were an attempt to put fragments of his thinking before the English-speaking public.

I could argue that if people still read and understood Byron, you could stick myself and everyone else in the Roissysphere in the toilet and yank the chain, because there’s little you can learn from us that you can’t get from a sustained study of the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” poet. Byron is unique among verse-makers in that his verses are actually enjoyable to read. After suffering through the likes of Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth, English literature got a poet whose writings flowed like good wine down the gullet. Even if you’re not a fan of poetry, Lord Byron makes for a worthwhile Sunday afternoon. As Thomas M. Disch wrote in his introduction to the Selected Poetry of Lord Byron:

…in which Byron found, for perhaps the first time in all poetry, the cadences of his own voice. Not the voice of The Poet, in its bardic or lyric vein, but the voice of the funny, flirty, snobbish, bawdy, brawling celebrity, rock superstar, and aristocrat that was George Gordon, aka Lord Byron.

Of course, it may simply be a mask, a persona, but the illusion that one is meeting a real person who has been transformed into ottawa rima is still compelling two centuries later, and once your ear is tuned to that voice the entire oeuvre begins to resonate.

For that reason Byron may be the most living of all the Dead White Males who wrote poetry. Keats will shiver your soul to a deeper depth, and Wordsworth elevate it to a higher attitude, but if you simply want to spend the night with your best friend, Byron’s the man.

Lord Byron is a great poet because his lines lack the bathos and pretention of other poets of the time. In particular, Byron told the unvarnished truth about women and what they wanted. His life experiences as a dissolute rake smashed to pieces every single pretty lie about women’s sexual desire that the English held so dear. See this article by Katha Pollitt in Slate (hat tip: Arts & Letters Daily), which gets it mostly right:

It is easy to see Byron as a cad, a narcissist and, at bottom, a misogynist. But that would be unfair. Byron’s great insight, in an era where women were expected to be placid and insipid (not that they were!), was to see that women were much like men: They wanted sex and went after it eagerly, if secretly. Don Juan, his great satiric novel in verse, is a virtual catalog of passionate women who are anything but bashful, even if still virginal, and who are presented without condemnation, as human beings doing what human beings do. He understood, too, how limited was women’s scope for action. “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,” writes Juan’s first love, the married Donna Julia, from the convent to which she is confined when their affair is discovered. ” ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.”

Byron’s electrifying effect on women readers was inspired not just by his handsomeness, his woundedness, and the exciting hope of reforming him, which was poor Annabella’s undoing. It was also due to his frankness, that sense his poetry gave that he understood his reader’s secret rebellious thoughts and longings for experience, pleasure, a life beyond tea tables. It wasn’t only the Greeks who found in him a champion of freedom.

The reason the Lake Poets hated Byron’s guts is the same reason why losers hate on guys with game (hat tip: Roissy): his existence was a refutation of everything about women that they held dear. To see this, let’s look at a Byron poem I posted last month:

To Woman

Woman! experience might have told me
That all must love thee, who behold thee:
Surely experience might have taught
Thy firmest promises are nought;
But, plac’d in all thy charms before me,
All I forget, but to adore thee.
Oh memory! thou choicest blessing,
When join’d with hope, when still possessing;
But how much curst by every lover
When hope is fled, and passion’s over.
Woman, that fair and fond deceiver,
How prompt are striplings to believe her!
How throbs the pulse, when first we view
The eye that rolls in glossy blue,
Or sparkles black, or mildly throws
A beam from under hazel brows!
How quick we credit every oath,
And hear her plight the willing troth!
Fondly we hope ’twill last for ay,
When, lo! she changes in a day.
This record will for ever stand,
“Woman, thy vows are trac’d in sand.”

Sound familiar? To summarize: “Women are amoral and flaky. When they fall out of love with you, beware. Don’t trust them implicitly or put them on a pedestal.” Keep in mind that this poem was written in 1806. Byron knew the truth about the less-fair sex long before a community had to be formed in order to spell it out. To contrast, here’s a poem written by the Conor Friedersdorf of British letters, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Love

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o’er again that happy hour,
When midway on the mount I lay,
Beside the ruined tower.

The moonshine, stealing o’er the scene
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!

She leant against the arméd man,
The statue of the arméd knight;
She stood and listened to my lay,
Amid the lingering light.

Few sorrows hath she of her own,
My hope! my joy! my Genevieve!
She loves me best, whene’er I sing
The songs that make her grieve.

I played a soft and doleful air,
I sang an old and moving story—
An old rude song, that suited well
That ruin wild and hoary.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes and modest grace;
For well she knew, I could not choose
But gaze upon her face.

I told her of the Knight that wore
Upon his shield a burning brand;
And that for ten long years he wooed
The Lady of the Land.

I told her how he pined: and ah!
The deep, the low, the pleading tone
With which I sang another’s love,
Interpreted my own.

She listened with a flitting blush,
With downcast eyes, and modest grace;
And she forgave me, that I gazed
Too fondly on her face!

But when I told the cruel scorn
That crazed that bold and lovely Knight,
And that he crossed the mountain-woods,
Nor rested day nor night;

That sometimes from the savage den,
And sometimes from the darksome shade,
And sometimes starting up at once
In green and sunny glade,—

There came and looked him in the face
An angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew it was a Fiend,
This miserable Knight!

And that unknowing what he did,
He leaped amid a murderous band,
And saved from outrage worse than death
The Lady of the Land!

And how she wept, and clasped his knees;
And how she tended him in vain—
And ever strove to expiate
The scorn that crazed his brain;—

And that she nursed him in a cave;
And how his madness went away,
When on the yellow forest-leaves
A dying man he lay;—

His dying words—but when I reached
That tenderest strain of all the ditty,
My faultering voice and pausing harp
Disturbed her soul with pity!

All impulses of soul and sense
Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve;
The music and the doleful tale,
The rich and balmy eve;

And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
An undistinguishable throng,
And gentle wishes long subdued,
Subdued and cherished long!

She wept with pity and delight,
She blushed with love, and virgin-shame;
And like the murmur of a dream,
I heard her breathe my name.

Her bosom heaved—she stepped aside,
As conscious of my look she stepped—
Then suddenly, with timorous eye
She fled to me and wept.

She half enclosed me with her arms,
She pressed me with a meek embrace;
And bending back her head, looked up,
And gazed upon my face.

‘Twas partly love, and partly fear,
And partly ’twas a bashful art,
That I might rather feel, than see,
The swelling of her heart.

I calmed her fears, and she was calm,
And told her love with virgin pride;
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride.

If you started nodding off during that wretched bit of bathetic brain-vomit, let me get you back up to speed. Coleridge not only worships women, he puts them up on a pedestal so damn high it stretches into space. He clearly believes in the supposed ability of women to civilize men. Not only that, Coleridge’s gestalt of romance is a stereotypically beta one. Instead of seizing the moment and taking what he wants, the nameless protagonist of “Love” cowardly beats around the bush in hopes that Genevieve will see the light and realize that he loves her (hint, guys: that approach doesn’t work). If Byron was the original badboy, Coleridge was the original nice guy.

As the original badboy, Byron invented the concept of the “Byronic hero,” the traits of which are as follows:

• high level of intelligence and perception
• cunning and able to adapt
• sophisticated and educated
• self-critical and introspective
• mysterious, magnetic and charismatic
• struggling with integrity
• power of seduction and sexual attraction
• social and sexual dominance
• emotional conflicts, bipolar tendencies, or moodiness
• a distaste for social institutions and norms
• being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw
• “dark” attributes not normally associated with a hero
• disrespect of rank and privilege
• a troubled past
• cynicism
• arrogance
• self-destructive behavior

Again, ringing any bells? Women love it when men behave badly, and Byron lived that life to the extreme. This is a guy who had an affair with his half-sister that purportedly resulted in a child, was divorced by another lady because he sodomized her, made love to over two hundred women during just his time in Venice (source: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition), and who died after going off to fight in the Greek War of Independence. You don’t have to start a revolution or bugger boys in order to get with women, but if you want to have more than your hand to entertain you, you better have a bit of an edge.

For another look at Byron, here’s another poem that I posted earlier, in which he gives advice to a lovelorn compadre:

Reply to some Verses of J.M.B. Pigot, Esq., on the Cruelty of his Mistress

1.

Why, Pigot, complain
Of this damsel’s disdain,
Why thus in despair do you fret?
For months you may try,
Yet, believe me, a sigh
Will never obtain a coquette.

2.

Would you teach her to love?
For a time seem to rove;
At first she may frown in a pet;
But leave her awhile,
She shortly will smile,
And then you may kiss your coquette.

3.

For such are the airs
Of these fanciful fairs,
They think all our homage a debt:
Yet a partial neglect
Soon takes an effect,
And humbles the proudest coquette.

4.

Dissemble your pain,
And lengthen your chain,
And seem her hauteur to regret;
If again you shall sigh,
She no more will deny,
That yours is the rosy coquette.

5.

If still, from false pride,
Your pangs she deride,
This whimsical virgin forget;
Some other admire,
Who will melt with your fire,
And laugh at the little coquette.

6.

For me, I adore
Some twenty or more,
And love them most dearly; but yet,
Though my heart they enthral,
I’d abandon them all,
Did they act like your blooming coquette.

7.

No longer repine,
Adopt this design,
And break through her slight-woven net!
Away with despair,
No longer forbear
To fly from the captious coquette.

8.

Then quit her, my friend!
Your bosom defend,
Ere quite with her snares you’re beset:
Lest your deep-wounded heart,
When incens’d by the smart,
Should lead you to curse the coquette.

Anyone with any comprehension as to how game works will recognize these lines as being completely truthful. If you want to win over a woman, act disinterested (For a time seem to rove/At first she may frown in a pet/But leave her awhile/She shortly will smile/And then you may kiss your coquette), get another woman (This whimsical virgin forget/Some other admire/Who will melt with your fire/And laugh at the little coquette), and as Master Dogen pointed out, if your game still doesn’t work, move on (Then quit her, my friend!/Your bosom defend). Lord Byron, the world’s first seduction guru?

Finally, here’s the sequel to that poem, in which Byron gives up on Pigot:

To the Sighing Strephon

1.

YOUR pardon, my friend,
If my rhymes did offend,
Your pardon, a thousand times o’er,
From friendship I strove,
Your pangs to remove,
But I swear I will do so no more.

2.

Since your beautiful maid
Your flame has repaid,
No more I your folly regret;
She’s now most divine,
And I bow at the shrine,
Of this quickly reformed coquette.

3.

Yet still, I must own,
I should never have known,
From your verses, what else she deserv’d,
Your pain seem’d so great,
I pitied your fate,
As your fair was so dev’lish reserv’d.

4.

Since the balm-breathing kiss,
Of this magical Miss,
Can such wonderful transports produce,
Since the “world you forget,”
“When your lips once have met,“
My counsel will get but abuse.

5.

You say, “When I rove,
I know nothing of love,”
‘Tis true, I am given to range,
If I rightly remember,
I’ve lov’d a good number,
But there’s pleasure, at least, in a change.

6.

I will not advance,
By the rules of romance,
To humour a whimsical fair,
Though a smile may delight,
Yet a frown will affright,
Or drive me to dreadful despair.

7.

While my blood is thus warm,
I ne’er shall reform,
To mix in the Platonists’ school;
Of this I am sure,
Was my passion so pure,
Thy mistress would think me a fool.

8.

And if I should shun,
Every woman for one,
Whose image must fill my whole breast;
Whom I must prefer,
And sigh but for her,
What an insult ‘twould be to the rest!

9.

Now, Strephon, good-bye,
I cannot deny,
Your passion appears most absurd;
Such love as you plead,
Is pure love, indeed,
For it only consists in the word.

Any man who’s ever been LJBF’ed knows its a humiliating experience. Being platonic friends with a woman who you desperately want to bang will eat away at your soul. The very ground these relationships are planted in is poisoned. And following the “rules of romance” is a great way to get punked.

The leftist, feminist humanities departments of the Anglosphere are in love with Lord Byron, whitewashing the truthfulness of his anti-egalitarian, anti-feminist sentiments by claiming he wasn’t really into women. The Slate article I discussed earlier displays this delusion in full force:

Unlike Fiona MacCarthy’s terrific Byron: Life and Legend, Byron in Love makes little of Byron’s homosexuality, which was far more extensive than O’Brien chronicles. For MacCarthy, indeed, his frenetic heterosexuality was due at least partly to British sodomy laws, which carried the death penalty; his passions for women were brief, and his behavior to them cruel and capricious, because he really wanted to be with teenage boys.

This is the typical cry of women in regards to players and lotharios: “You don’t like being around us all the time? You’re a FAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGG!” In their solipsistic squealing, they fail to consider that men aren’t women, and don’t have the same impulses. Neither Byron’s bisexuality nor his purported misogyny diminish his status as a man who loved and was loved by many women, despite what the feminists claim.

This concludes Part 1 of my piece on Lord Byron. Subsequent entries will focus on his life in greater depth and detail. Part 2 will be coming…nah, I’ve learned my lesson. You’ll get Part 2 when I feel like it. (And if anyone’s wondering why this entry is two days late, my muse hates it when I drink heavily.)

For further reading, see Project Gutenberg’s collection of Byron’s writings, and John Dolan’s excellent essay on Byron from 2006.