Lord Byron’s Oriental World 9781463233976

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Lord Byron’s Oriental World

Gorgias Ottoman Travelers

7

This series seeks to explore the experiences of travelers in Greece, Turkey, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt as reflected in their personal writings and memoirs and as analyzed by present-day scholars. The materials span the past two centuries and include historical studies as well as first-hand descriptions.

Lord Byron’s Oriental World

Naji Oueijan

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34 2011

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2011 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. 2011

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ISBN 978-1-4632-0157-9

ISSN 1946-2212

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oueijan, Naji B., 1951Lord Byron's oriental world / by Naji Oueijan. p. cm. -- (Gorgias Ottoman travelers) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1788-1824--Knowledge--Orient. I. Title. PR4392.O73O95 2011 821'.7--dc23 2011041878 Printed in the United States of America

TO MY GRANDCHILDREN NAJI-CHRISTOS AND NOUR-RITA

TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ....................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................... vii Foreword ......................................................................................... ix Acknowledgments ....................................................................... xvii Abbreviations ................................................................................ xix Introduction ..................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Byron‘s Eastern Quests: The Liberation of Self .............................................................................. 9 Chapter 2. Byron and Olympia ......................................... 21 Chapter 3. Byron‘s Virtual Tour of Lebanon ................. 31 Chapter 4. Western Exoticism And Byron‘s Orientalism ................................................................... 45 Chapter 5. Islam and Christianity in Byron‘s The Giaour ............................................................................. 55 Chapter 6. Byron‘s Eastern Literary Portraits................. 71 Chapter 7. Byron‘s Eastern Bride ..................................... 85 Chapter 8. Byron and Sufism ............................................ 97 Chapter 9. Byron, Delacroix and the Oriental Sublime........................................................................109 Chapter 10. Byron‘s Overpowering Sexual and Spiritual Identity ........................................................119 Chapter 11. Byron, D‘Herbelot and Oriental Culture ..127 Chapter 12. Lord Byron and Ameen F. Rihani .............135 Conclusion: Lord Byron‘s Universality ....................................147 Bibliography .................................................................................157 Index ..............................................................................................167

FOREWORD ―Stick to the East!‖ Madame de Stael advised Lord Byron on August 28, 1813 after he had published his first Oriental tale. ―It is the only poetical policy. The North, South, and West, have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing but S* *‘s [Southey‘s] unsaleables,—and these he has contrived to spoil, by adopting only their most outrageous fictions (3:101). Byron was writing to Thomas Moore, encouraging him to produce a ―Shah Nameh,‖ alluding to the rhymed history of Persia, Sháhnáma by Firdausi. Since that time, Byron‘s debt to Eastern influence has been a subject for many scholars. One can clearly distinguish the tone of those who have merely visited the East, however, and those who have lived there a long time, intimate with its customs and mores. At a time when academics and ―media fixers‖ (to use Prof. Oueijan‘s term) seem intent on understanding areas of conflict or scoring points that illumine differences between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Naji Oueijan gives us a book that shows what they have in common. His Byron is complex because he draws on his own rich cultural background to illuminate what has not always been apparent to Byron‘s readers. ―The fact that East is and is not all Muslim as much as West was and is not all Christian seems to be a potion not easily swallowed by some Western and some Eastern critics and readers, when history has proven otherwise‖ (59). One of the ironies of Edward Said‘s Orientalism is that it reinforced as many prejudices about the East as it uncovered. Though it helped produce fields such as Postcolonial studies, Said‘s work also had a polarizing effect on attitudes towards the East, some of which have been repeated in works such as The Clash of Civilizations, which Said himself has attacked, and op-ed columns in the New York Times. ―Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists,‖ Samuel Huntington writes.

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―Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise‖ (209). Paul Berman‘s Terror and Liberalism presents a more nuanced view, as does Amartya Sen, who notes that democracy is not a Western invention. "Diversity is a feature of most cultures in the world. Western civilization is no exception. The practice of democracy that has won out in the modern West is largely a result of a consensus that has emerged since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the last century or so. To read in this a historical commitment of the West—over the millennia—to democracy, and then to contrast it with non-Western traditions (treating each as monolithic) would be a great mistake" (16; Journal of Democracy 10 (3): 3–17). Since Said‘s writings and September 11, Oueijan points out, ―Orientalism as a literary discourse has taken a different course, one which is less polemic and more geared towards better understanding of the Eastern cultures through objective and scientific scholarly research and investigation.‖ Equally important is his comment that ―Byron does not take sides as he exposes the ills and virtues of the histories, traditions, and cultures of both worlds in his personal correspondence and in his works‖ (2). In this fine study, Prof. Oueijan traces what he calls Byron‘s Olympic spirit, noting how his sense of adventure in the East fueled his poetic fire and he enjoyed the intensity of these moments, which became later sparks spiriting his poetry‖ (27 note). Byron rejected the opportunity to travel with Lady Hester Stanhope in Lebanon, partly because their personalities clashed. Based on a letter to his friend Hobhouse describing his encounter with this erudite woman, Oueijan imagines a tour of Lebanon in which Byron writes further cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage that allude to ―Tyre, Sidon, Baalbek, the Cedars, and Byblos…Byron would have turned Emir Beshir into a major character in another Oriental tale‖(43). Through such imaginative speculation, Oueijan shows that the Byronic spirit is not limited to his literary works but can be used to illuminate the political situation of his and our time. ―The Western writers and artists exhausted traditional themes and views,‖ Oueijan notes. ―Classical views which did not afford them with bright visions of the world, and much less of their lives. The collective psychology of Western writers and artists was that of gloominess and stiffness, and the culture of the East was not only bright and wealthy, but different; it revitalized their imaginative

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faculties which had been restrained for centuries by classical principles. But not so for the Western public whose interest in the exotic East was a dream-like escape into other worlds‖ (46). Oueijan points out the confusion that has occurred between exoticism and orientalism, two difficult terms, and brings a wide range of critics, including Tztvan Todorov and John Mackeznie to bear on his discussion of Byron‘s Oriental tales. ―We cherish the remote because of its remoteness,‖ Todorov wrote. ―Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be‖ (113). Oueijan notes how critics ―misinterpreted his [Byron‘s] genuine interest in Oriental culture as a concern in becoming a Levantine merchant of exotic poetic material‖ (49). ―Byron‘s Western readers were like tourists in foreign lands; they would enjoy the most repellent spectacles (the drowning of Leila, the killing of Hassan, the burning of Seyd‘s Harem, etc.) as long as they were not participants. Exotic pleasure, then, is created by ―the illusion of enclosure within an exotic space,‖ and is based on the separation of the spectator from the spectacle (49) Ironically, Byron‘s representations of the East have found greater acceptance in the places he has allegedly offended than in the West, where critics have been quick to list him as an Orientalist besotted by his own Western superiority. ―Romantic writers like Byron and Scott consequently had a political vision of the Near Orient and a very combative awareness of how relations between the Orient and Europe would have to be conducted,‖ Edward Said wrote in Orientalism (192). Nigel Leask, in British Romantic Writers and the East (1992), argues that ―Byron was not so sure that he could disassociate himself from the lucrative trade in orientalism, any more than he believed that he could stand in Spartan opposition to the corruption of his age and country … the poetic orientalism which Byron was touting in his 1813 letter to Moore [quoted in the first paragraph of this preface] itself participates in the discourse of imperialism which to many of his Whig, as well as Tory contemporaries appeared to be the `manifest destiny‘ of the nation, the extension of the classical values of `Pax Britannica‘ over the world‖ (16). Oueijan challenges Said and Leask, as well as Eric Meyer, showing how such scholars as Mohammed Sharafuddin and Abdur

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Raheem Kidwai present a more balanced view of Byron‘s literary representations. Mohammed Sharafuddin, who thinks that ―Said‘s study is empirically suspect and methodologically contradictory,‖ asserts that ―the Romantic movement emerged as resistance to massive despotism, and that its writers were reacting against political and cultural centralization,‖ the reason why they had a genuine interest in other cultures (xvi). Kidwai notes that ―the Giaour shares in equal measure the vices and weaknesses of Hassan. Byron casts them in the same mould, which rules out Giaour‘s superiority over his Oriental adversary‖ (57). Oueijan concludes that ―Byron‘s life-long struggle against oppression is general knowledge, and to read the tale as implying his siding with the Western or the Christian imperialist ambitions is not only confusing but misleading, as well.‖ He coins a term, ―futilitarianism,‖ to describe the end product of fundamentalism (56) and encourages intellectuals to think beyond modish fashions in academia, popularized by such writers as Samuel Huntington, who have published in important venues like Foreign Affairs. ―One must not ignore the fact that tensions and even bloody encounters among Christian sects themselves were at times more ferocious than the politically motivated encounters between Western forces and Eastern ones. It is wrong, then, to assume that all encounters between the East and the West were cultural and/or religious. Also, it is high time to tell the truth, as Byron always sought to do, that economic invasions take different masks, mostly religious and cultural, and that the god of materialism and money, and not the divine God, occupied and still occupies man‘s immediate concerns and governs world affairs; this god is behind all fatal and futile encounters‖ (61). One can agree with him when he asserts that the ―West still lacks a genuine knowledge of Eastern cultures, and especially, of Islam‖ (61). In an interesting correction to other academic fads, Oueijan notes that ―religions cannot and must not be classified under gender,‖ as seems to be the case in Eric Meyer‘s reading of ―The Giaour.‖ He denies the ―imperialistic implications of the tale‖ [―The Giaour‖] and argues that ―the readers of Byron‘s Giaour, especially the modern reader, must not be baited by the above wining/losing dialectic and by the stereotyping of the East and the West by some literary critics. This dialectic is cause enough for invigorating new conflicts and encounters among cultures‖ (69). ―If

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Byron proposes the superiority of anything,‖ Oueijan concludes convincingly,‖ it is the superiority of Truth‖ (70). Oueijan has high praise for Byron‘s poetry. ‗It is indeed difficult for a Western writer to put Eastern life into his characters, to make them think, speak, and act like Easterners would, yet Byron, who enjoyed dealing with difficult tasks, painted with his pen genuine Eastern portraits which would make an Eastern reader of his Oriental tales wonder whether those were originally written in Eastern languages or not‖ (74). Oueijan closes his book with an especially helpful account of the works of Al-Ghazzali and the Sufi poet Ibn l‘Arabi, as well as Abul ‗Ala, showing how important the Lebanese poet and philosopher Ameen Rihani‘s translation of The Luzumiyat of Abul ‘Ala (1978) is to an understanding of Byron‘s verse. His account of Jelaluddin Rumi, a Sufi poet and founder of the Mevlevi order of dervishes, provides a good starting point for further investigations into Byron‘s relationship to Eastern verse, left out of most accounts of Byron‘s poetry written in the 1990s. ―Byron seems to advance the Sufi ideal of wuhdat al-wujud, ‗the unity of being,‘ which the self cannot approach or perceive unless it is purged by the divine power of selfless love,‖ Oueijan writes. ―Like the Sufi poets, Byron found in Nature the very principles of gnosis… Nature, then, becomes a vast book of Divine Wisdom‖ (105). His application of well-known Stanzas from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to Sufi poetry will guide generations of Western readers to read Byron‘s verse in new ways. Oueijan builds on McGann‘s discussion of oral poetry in ―the Giaour‖ in Fiery Dust, showing how Byron made use of Sufism as well as oral traditions of Turkish dervishes, to articulate an Eastern dimension to Giaour‘s love of Leila. His important chapter opens up a new approach to the poem which engages with ―The Giaour‘s‖ most important theme: the vagaries of human love. He wisely extends this discussion to Don Juan and Haidee, and Selim and Zuleikha in The Bride of Abydos as well as Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. His observations on Byron and religion, especially gnosis, should open up lines of inquiry in Blake studies and provide new ways of looking at the poetry of Wordsworth (105). With Oueijan, we feel we are in the hands of a critic who subordinates his own polemic to illuminate Byron‘s text, the mark of a true scholar and teacher. Drawing on his thorough knowledge of

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Eastern names and etymologies as demonstrated in his books A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron’s Oriental Tales and The Progress of an Image, as well as his complete command of Byron‘s verse, honed over 15 years of participation in International Byron conferences, Oueijan gives us not a brash book, but a wise one. He does not shock, but he persuades. Jonathan Gross September 16, 2011

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My acknowledgement goes first to all who encouraged me to put this collection of articles in this volume; especially members of the International Byron Society. To Professors Diane Long Hoeveler and Jonathan Gross, I am grateful for their review of this work. I like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Harvey Naji Oueijan for his vigilant reading of the manuscript. I would like to acknowledge all Byron scholars for their support and enriching comments. I am particularly indebted to all faculty and staff members and especially the librarians at Notre Dame University, Lebanon, for their courteous and friendly support. My personal debt goes to all members of my family, especially to my wife Nawal, whose love and understanding made my pursuit in the world of academia and scholarship smooth and comfortable.

ABBREVIATIONS Bride BLJ Childe Corsair CPW Giaour Khalid Siege The Journal WLB

The Bride of Abydos Byron’s Letters and Journals Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage The Corsair Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works The Giaour The Book of Khalid The Siege of Corinth The Journal of Eugene Delacroix The Works of Lord Byron

INTRODUCTION The course of literary Orientalism was mainly set by Edward Said‘s Orientalism (1977), a comprehensive, enticing, and standard work until the tragic events of September 11, 2001, when Orientalism as a literary discourse has taken a different course, one which is less polemic and more geared towards better understanding of the Eastern cultures through objective and scientific scholarly research and investigation. Here lies the significance of this work, which employs a new approach, one advancing an objective cross-cultural understanding between East and West. Having an Eastern background and a Western education and being involved in the Annual International Byron Conferences for more than 15 years, and serving as Chair of the Organizing Committee for an annual series of panel discussions titled, ―Common Platforms for Bridging World Cultures,‖ at Notre Dame University, Lebanon, ever since 2008, enabled me to present an objective perspective of Orientalism in general and of Byron‘s, in particular. Besides, several Western and Eastern Byron scholars urged me to compile my articles about Byron‘s Orientalism in one work, which addresses Orientalism as a genuine Western interest in studying the East and its cultures. Most discussions of Western scholars of Orientalism including, but not limited to, Martha Pike Conant (1908), A. J. Arberry (1943), Norman Daniel (1962), Nigel Leask (1969), Samuel Chew (1974), Byron Porter Smith (1977), Lisa Lowe (1991), Mohammed Sharafuddin (1994), Ali Behdad (1994), John MacKenzie (1995), Bryan Turner (2000), Reina Lewis (2004), Daniel Martin Varisco (2007), A. R. Kidwai (2009) and others have offered significant discussions of the origin and development of Orientalism in general while touching briefly on Byron‘s Oriental scholarship. And although eminent scholars such as Harold Wiener (1938), Albert Tezla (1952), Bernard Blackstone (1974), Marilyn Butler (1988), David Waterman (1996) and several others wrote seminal articles

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about Byron‘s Oriental tales and scholarship; those treated the subject from a Western perspective. Books about Byron‘s Orientalism were also written by scholars such as A. R. Kidwai (1995), Anahid Melikian (1977), and Peter Cochran (2006) shed light onto significant aspects of Byron‘s Orientalism. However, their works were limited to either Byron‘s major works, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, or to the literary backgrounds of Byron‘s Oriental tales. This work investigates Byron‘s personal and literary representations of the Orient and argues that his Oriental scholarship not only advances the discourse of genuine Orientalism but also constructs a platform upon which the West and the East are analyzed, satirized, and/or praised objectively. Byron does not take sides as he exposes the ills and virtues of the histories, traditions, and cultures of both worlds in his personal correspondence and in his works. In this respect, this work should appeal to the academicians and students investigating the Orientalism of Lord Byron from a fresh perspective, one which approaches Orientalism from objective Eastern and Western perspectives. If nothing else, I hope this work provides sufficient stimulus for scholars to further investigate and research the subject-matter, especially as the issue is nowadays no longer related to literary interests and studies alone but to current cross-cultural conflicts and misapprehensions, all the reason why this work should also be relevant to contemporary historians and politicians, as well. Chapters cover Byron‘s personal contacts with the Eastern World, its cultures, politics, and traditional social practices to end up with the poet‘s significance as a genuine Orientalist whose marks are stamped in universal scholarship. The first chapter claims that from the beginning, Romantic poets discharged their observations of themselves and the world in works carrying bits and pieces of their traditional culture mixed with fragments of different or even unfamiliar cultures. Romantic poets and especially Lord Byron sought their literary identities in realms lying outside the restrictive rules of orthodoxy. Byron‘s decision at the beginning of his literary career to replace the traditional Grand Tour, a Continental tour, with an Eastern one translates this interest. To Byron, the East was a kind of sanctuary in which he could confess his innermost self and find personal relief and freedom. The East was his muse; it inflamed his poetic inspiration and provided him with the opportunity to experience new realms of knowledge. He

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needed to find his own space in the world, and the East was his testing grounds because in it he could steer the contours of his selfhood. The second chapter discusses Byron‘s free soul, which lies at the core of the Olympic spirit, inflamed by Dionysus and Oedipus. Lord Byron‘s quest for the Olympic spirit in the Land of Olympia manifested itself in two forms: personal and literary. Byron‘s travels to the East and especially to Greece were conscious quests for freedom, adventure, and discovery; i.e., quests for the liberating Self and Other. On a private level, he became more than ever aware of his own physical and intellectual capabilities and limitations. On a broader level and to his disappointment, he found the Olympic spirit lost in its native land amidst men‘s destructive competitions to procure wealth and power, so he ardently tried to revive the Olympic spirit in Greece; his works written during or after his pilgrimages to Greece testify the above mentioned. The third chapter is prompted by Byron‘s initial plan for his Eastern tour which was not only limited to Albania, Greece, and Turkey but also included other Eastern regions like Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Persia and India. Byron, however, could not complete his Eastern tour for lack of funds and for personal problems in his homeland. This chapter creates a Byronic virtual tour of only a small but significant part of the East Byron was eager to visit, Lebanon. This virtual tour is based on Byron‘s knowledge of and interest in this region, especially that in his major works he makes several references to Lebanon. This Byronic virtual tour reinforces my assumption that his major works, especially the travelogues and his Oriental tales, would have undoubtedly undergone a tremendous expansion and change had he visited this region. The fourth chapter investigates the nineteenth-century understanding of exoticism and Orientalism, which is a problematic discourse. Although the two concepts cannot be treated in complete isolation, as the one might induce the other, each term can be treated as a discrete entity. Indeed, Byron‘s Oriental tales invigorated the exotic experience in his contemporary readers (the exotes), who wrongly considered his tales as expressions of exoticism. Eastern names, costumes, sites and climates, more than Eastern themes and thought, attracted the attention of Byron‘s public and stimulated their sense of exoticism, a sense of nostalgia for the distant Other. But in his correspondence, Byron repeatedly stresses

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that the tales are written ―from reality‖ and not from his exotic attitudes towards the East. Byron‘s main objective was to give the tales the proper local color of the East, a purpose he achieved by being faithful to Other, which had so much cultural wealth to offer. Byron participated in Other to present it as it was and not as it would impress his Western audience. The confusion of exoticism with Orientalism, then, implies, if anything, that the nineteenth century reading of these terms suffered from a misunderstanding, which distorted representations and conceptions about the East. The same reading also ravaged the scholarship of genuine Oriental scholars like Lord Byron. The fifth chapter counters Edward Said‘s claims that Orientalism is a Western means for domination and proves its falsehood with respect to Byron‘s The Giaour. And it seems that the tragic September 11 events created a kind of ―Islamophobia,‖ to use Said‘s word, in the West, and to reinforce Samuel Huntington‘s claim that the current danger threatening global politics is the clash of civilizations. In The Giaour, Byron‘s main purpose was far more farsighted than exposing the superiority of one culture over the other, for he goes beyond the then current conceptions of global affairs to show that all man-made encounters are fatal and futile. Byron‘s Oriental tales expose his dissatisfaction with all cultural and even religious practices of Easterners and Westerners alike. In The Giaour, Byron reveals the destructive practices of people belonging to the East and to the West because he believed that misinterpretations hinder the forces of the inevitable drive toward global peace. The sixth chapter authenticates Byron‘s Oriental scholarship. He paints his Eastern portraits just as an Easterner who carries the Eastern cultural heritage in his blood and in the back of his mind. And the life he puts in his literary portraits is a life lived by almost most Easterners. Byron‘s deep concern for authenticity originated from his natural fidelity to fact, and his own pronouncements supplement the above points. Byron did ―combat lustily‖ to render his literary portraits highly authentic, and he succeeded because he used his interest in, his knowledge of, and his personal experiences in the East to achieve authentic images of the East. The seventh chapter testifies the authenticity of The Bride of Abydos, which again validates Byron‘s Oriental scholarship. Byron‘s observation of D‘Herbelot‘s Bibliotheque Orientale, of Jami‘s Yusuf

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and Zulaykha, of Sadi‘s song of Mejnoun in his Gulistan [i.e., ―rose garden‖], and of Firdausi and Hafiz form the basic background of the tale. The similitude in the circumstances of Byron‘s Bride of Abydos and the Eastern tales discussed are quite distinctive. Byron‘s proficient integration of genuine Eastern literary elements in his Bride of Abydos has rendered it remarkably Oriental. These Eastern elements are not superficial and decorative references; they are the core components of the Oriental tale and place him in the vanguard of Oriental scholars. The eighth chapter discusses selfless love or selflessness in Byron‘s poetry, an issue which might seem quite disputable to academicians who consider his works models of the self-centeredness. Indeed, the self in Lord Byron is so conspicuous that to speak of selflessness at all seems far-fetched. Byron‘s poetic expression is packed with confrontations between Self and Other, especially the traditional and formalized Other. Without denying the existence of these, this chapter suggests that selfless love is an essential feature of some of Byron‘s major poetry, and that this feature is greatly influenced and shaped by his personal interest in and knowledge of Sufism. It proves that Byron‘s passionate fusion with the elements of nature carries his poetry to the level of a private theosophy reflecting his most sublime and mystical insights, a therapeusis of the self and the intellect. Like the Sufi poets, Byron found in Nature the very principles of gnosis. Byron takes love to a level beyond the temporal and spatial in the selfless love between Giaour and Leila, Selim and Zuleika, and even Don Juan and Haidèe; he takes love to a level which defies the physical and sensuous and which fuses the souls in an everlasting eagerness, itself capable of diffusing physical pain and of creating the divinely harmonious ―colors of the world.‖ This chapter, however, does not suggest that Byron was a Sufi poet, but that, when he desired, he wrote like one and that Bernard Blackstone‘s keen hints at Byron‘s interest in Sufism deserve closer attention. The ninth chapter places Byron on the unfailing spur of the Romantic sublime experience. Byron‘s tragic scenes, which involve untamed grief, anger, brutality, and horror, attracted Delacroix because they depicted the most intense and perilous passionate instances in man‘s life., The Corsair, Lara, Sardanapalus: A Tragedy, The Prisoner of Chillon, Don Juan, Marino Faliero: An Historical Tragedy, and Mazeppa fired Delacroix‘s imaginative powers to produce several

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paintings. In his journal, Delacroix places Byron on the same level as Dante, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo. And to see how Delacroix‘s debt to Byron manifests itself in paintings exhibiting Oriental sublime scenes is to appreciate Byron‘s sublime Oriental poetic images. This chapter, however, proves that Byron goes beyond Delacroix in his portrayal of shocking and binary sublime scenes, which are paramount to the tales‘ thematic exposition and to the creation of the uplifting Oriental experience. The tenth chapter discusses Byron‘s sexual and spiritual identities as manifested in his personal life, correspondence, and works, especially his Oriental tales and the Turkish cantos of Don Juan, all of which reveal a complex identity exhibiting an amalgam of the overpowering sensual and spiritual. Love affairs in Byron‘s personal life and in the above mentioned works range from the erotic and lustful to the pure and spiritual, and indeed this particular blend generates dramatic tensions between Self and Self and Self and Other. These tensions culminate in images of sensuality demeaning Self and Other or in images of spirituality redeeming Self and Other and become locus for revealing Byron‘s overpowering sexuality and spirituality. Chapter eleven discusses Byron‘s employment of traditional Eastern literary conventions upon which an Eastern tragic love tale would be based in his The Giaour. An Eastern reader is exalted by Byron‘s ability to render his Eastern references artistically condensed and smooth enough to satisfy an informed Eastern and Western reader. Though D‘Herbelot and others may have provided Byron with Eastern sources, but they could not have given him the artistic skills and craftsmanship to render Eastern elements in his tale function symbolically and thematically as much as they do in Persian poetry. The twelfth chapter investigates Byron‘s influence on the Lebanese-American writer, Ameen Fares Rihani, who fell under the spell of Lord Byron and bought a marble from his tomb in Nottingham. Both figures‘ personal travels and their creative travelogues—if Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Book of Khalid can be identified, amongst other genres, as travelogues—should not be only taken as representing physical pilgrimages in the outer world but also as spiritual and intellectual pursuits for liberating and shaping universal Self. Also this chapter discusses Rihani‘s Khalid as a model of the Byronic hero whose pilgrimage from the West to the

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East and back to the West represents a typical romantic circuitous quest aimed toward self-universalization. The conclusion to this work serves to expose Byron‘s universality and moral responsibility, as poet and man, at particular times and places, are discussed with the contention that his travels to the East enhanced his sense of universal moral values. Kant‘s perception of freedom and moral responsibility apply to Byron, especially that his use of satire as tool to tell the truth about Self and Other is marked in all his major works. The chapter ends with a discussion of the influence of his Eastern tours on fostering his universal moral values.

BYRON’S EASTERN QUESTS: THE LIBERATION OF SELF There is no questioning that ―Romantic poets are driven to a quest for self-creation, for self-comprehension, for self-positioning that is unprecedented in literature‖ (Ross, 26). Such a quest seems an irrevocable intellectual drive by the Romantic self to comprehend itself and the world of the other. And if, as M. H. Abrams asserts, the Romantics commissioned themselves the task of reinterpreting their cultural inheritance, for developing ―new modes of organizing experience, new ways of seeing the outer world, and a new set of relations of the individual to himself, to nature, to history, and to his fellow men‖ (14), then their quest symbolizes a search for knowledge and, consequently, for freedom. The roaming of the British Romantics in the world of the other, on the Continent or in foreign lands, becomes an integral part of the process of the liberation of Self from its own contextual confines: native social and religious traditions, and cultural and political limitations. In this respect, when John Drinkwater borrowed Shelley‘s phrase, ―The Pilgrim of Eternity,‖ and used it as title for his book on Byron, he was quite aware that Byron‘s Eastern quests were not to be taken only as representing physical pilgrimages in the world of the other but also as spiritual and intellectual pursuits for self-formation, which forerun self-liberation. Here, I must define ―Self‖ and ―Other‖ as Byron and his contemporary romantics perceived them. To the romantics, Self constituted England and the Continental countries; i.e., most European countries excluding Greece, Albania, and parts of western Turkey. The Norman invasion of the British Island in 1066, contributed to the elimination of the cultural and political boarder lines separating England from the rest of the Continent. Though native British social and religious traditions were preserved, British cultural movements—especially British Romanticism—were strongly tied up with and influenced by the

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French, German, Italian, and other Continental cultures. As to the religious self, Christianity bound England and the Continent though religious differences and conflicts were sometimes crucial in setting peaceful and/or violent relationships among the countries of the Continent. Thus, the cultural and religious self of the British was similar in many ways to the Continental one. On the other hand, the world of the other or ―Other‖ represented one with a different culture and religion; the closest to the Western world was the Oriental one, nowadays coined as the Middle East, which was decked out with a different cultural heritage and religion, Islam. This different world represented ―Other,‖ which to many romantics who were seeking the exotic and distant, represented an accessible different world. From the beginning, Romantic poets discharged their observations of themselves and the world in works carrying bits and pieces of their traditional culture mixed with fragments of different or even unfamiliar cultures. And from the beginning of Romanticism, diversity of literary identity characterized them. Their writing, it is true, maintained a sense of Romantic identity; but this was free from uniformity and susceptible to mobility. Each Romantic poet sought his literary identity in realms lying outside the restrictive rules of orthodoxy. (Oueijan, ―Sufism, Christian Mysticism and Romanticism,‖ 125)

Then one must not wonder at Byron‘s decision at the beginning of his literary career to replace the traditional Grand Tour, a Continental tour, with an Eastern one, especially that from his early childhood, he was fascinated with difference. However, one may wonder at Byron‘s determination to return to the Eastern other after he had established his authority and fame as a leading literary figure in the Western world, all the reason why in this article I contend that Byron‘s choice to leave his homeland and to venture outside his Western milieu, into the world of the Eastern other, is an attempt to liberate himself from his Western self and to procure physical, intellectual, and spiritual healing. ―Byron‘s travels in the eastern Mediterranean were to make him a poet and shape many of his interests as a man. It was a fatal, enriching encounter,‖ asserts Stephen Coote (37). Byron himself confesses in one of his letters: ―With those countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end‖

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(BLJ, V, 45). This statement, I believe, has not yet been given the attention it deserves by Byron scholars, although it constitutes the crux upon which rests his poetic genius. Byron‘s personal and literary writing attest the fact that the East represented to him a world where his spirit and intellect were free to roam beyond, and even soar high above, the complexities and confinements of his Western Self. The East gave Byron the space he urgently needed to discover Self; it also gave him a sense of real existence and the opportunity he awaited to set his personal and poetic passions free. It gave him the opportunity to escape from the gossip and cant of Regency society and to reconstruct his position as a representative of the radical rebel protesting against hypocrisy and tyranny. But before considering these points in detail, a brief reading of other key terms used in this work must be clarified. In literature, ―quest‖ and ―liberation‖ cannot be dealt with in complete isolation. While the first indicates a physical and/or spiritual pursuit and search for a desired object, the second denotes the freeing of that object from physical or spiritual restraints. Quests usually entail inner and outer journeys made by Self in search for meaning, for certainty, or for higher values, all of which would liberate it from self-boundaries and restraints. A literary quest aims at liberating Self from inner obstacles, which hinder the acquisition of knowledge and maintain the faculties separating Self from Other. Such a quest almost always precedes liberation, which is its ultimate purpose. It follows that the quest for self-liberation represents a search in Self and Other for corporal, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual healing. Such a quest brings the immediate state of being into an evolutionary wholistic process of change and transformation that enhances the condition of the self and guides it toward an agreeable state of being. It eliminates negative emotional and mental barriers between Self and Self and Self and Other, thus, accelerating a kind of reunification with the true Self and with Other. Also prejudice toward Other is replaced by compassionate and reverent acceptance. Therefore, in its most meaningful purposes, a quest for self-liberation is a means to willingly accept the truth of feelings and experiences without judgment or shame and to see clearly through preconceived notions, out-dated ideological and religious beliefs, and social norms. Embraced with love, Self redeems itself and the world around it; then the roots of the powerful uncons-

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cious attachments to self-denial or self-deprival and rejection are controlled, and the most effective procedures for growth and creativity are provided. In this respect, Byron‘s and other Romantic poets‘ perceptive growth and conditions of literary creativity are acts of self-consciousness and self-liberation. But freedom and self-liberation cannot be achieved unless the terrain of Self goes beyond its disciplinary boundaries to interact with outside objects. Discussing Wordsworth‘s ―Resolution and Independence,‖ Richard Eldridge confirms that the mere determination to act, not to wait, is not enough to enable freedom, self-knowledge, and self-realization. Alone, such determination remains a sign of distress. One must concretely find one‘s way out of absorption in subjective experience and to actual knowledge and rational and expressive action. How can this move be made? Only through the expe-

rience of an other. (119) The pursuit of freedom in the Self, then, begins by its accepting to embrace the Other. It may begin from the shared values in a community or from, what Eldridge would call, ―the sociality of personhood.‖ However, freedom is not accomplished until determination is transformed into an action of relational interaction with an Other. In her Literature and the Relational Self, a work which cannot be ignored, Barbara Ann Schapiro asserts: The relational model in the social and natural sciences has implications for the critical models and frameworks that we bring to the study of literature and the arts. With its focus on dynamic, interactive patterns and relationships, the relational paradigm can redirect our attention to the interconnections, and not just the disruptions, in our cultural and literary analyses. While dismissing essentialist structures and absolute categories or truths, the relational model nevertheless highlights significant orders of connection and relationship; it expands the possibilities for meaning in our understanding of human experience, and in the creative reconstruction of that experience in art and literature. (5)

Indeed, self-formation and self-liberation are relative and dependent upon contexts; they are acts of relational love. Why love? Because it is the principle agent which harmonizes and synthesizes

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while contempt is an agent which confuses and separates; this is what the Romantics would eagerly confess. Besides, self-formation and self-liberation need an idealized object which would act as a model to free it from its disciplinary boundaries; then Self, by building up its own units and sets of relational interactions with this object, is capable of the act of liberation. ―The emergence of a cohesive self depends on particular self-self-object relations,‖ asserts Heinz Kohut (Qtd. in Schapiro, 12). This, of course, affirms the significance of the Romantics‘ interaction with Man and Nature. It also confirms convictions that only through such an interaction can Self transcend its own boundaries and express its innermost impulses, which quite often are inhibited and hidden; thus, Self becomes free. On the other hand, if Self is restrained by its own boundaries and the possibilities of its transcendence of these boundaries are nonexistent, then the essential elements that would lead to the building up of units of relational interactions are removed, and self-liberation becomes impossible. Other hindrances for self-liberation are conflict with and contempt toward an Other. The causes of conflict and the sediments of contempt should be resolved before any attempt at reconciliation is made. Such critical thinking serves the purposes of this study, whose basic argument rests on the hypothesis that Byron‘s West and Western-contextual Self represented deterrents to achieving self-liberation, creative growth, and productivity, while the East denoted this Other with which he was able to construct relational interactions capable of liberating him from his Western boundaries. It is tempting here to make an analogy between Byron‘s interactions and relations with his Western milieu, on one hand, and with the Eastern world, on the other hand. From his earliest childhood, Byron had turbulent relations caused by a scurrilous mother, a lascivious nurse, a presumptuous adolescent lover, a cumbrous title, and a very scrupulous guardian. He detested his Cambridge days, and more than anything else he slowly developed a negative feel into Western evasions and cant. During childhood and adolescence, Byron suffered a bitter enclosure of Self. This is evident in his early letters. For instance, to William Banks he writes, ―I am therefore a solitary animal,‖ and to Edward Noel Long, ―I am an isolated Being on the Earth‖ (BLJ, I, 112 and 114). In ―My Soul is Dark,‖ the poet confesses that he must weep,

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD Or else this heavy heart will burst; For it has been by sorrow nursed, And ached in sleepless silence long. (CPW, III, 295–297)

His self-enclosure was a direct result of his inability to build up strong and constant relations with his Western milieu, an other which could neither attract Byron nor act as his idealized model. That he frequently expressed his eagerness to set himself free from his native milieu is an indication of his willingness to liberate his self from his Western self (See BLJ, I, 123, 149, 151, 173, 175, 197, 202–206, and 221). In one of his letters Byron writes to Hanson, ―and quit the country I must immediately,‖ in another he nearly begs, ―…allow me to depart from this cursed country, and I promise to turn Mussulman rather than return to it‖ (BLJ, I, 201 and 202). In a footnote to the first letter, Leslie Marchand writes, ―What Byron‘s urgent reasons for leaving England were at this time has never been revealed‖ (BLJ, I, 201). However, I believe that one of the reasons was Byron‘s eagerness to liberate himself from his Western self. Five days before his departure to Eastern climes, Byron wrote from Falmouth to his friend Francis Hodgson, ―— —I leave England without regret, I shall return to it without pleasure. — —I am like Adam the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve, and have eaten no apple but what was sour as a crab and thus ends my first chapter‖ (BLJ, I, 211). Indeed, Byron started a new chapter in the book of his life the moment he boarded the Lisbon Packet. The idea of departing from his Western self revived his sense of humor in a poem he sent to Hodgson two days before he left England: Now at length we‘re off for Turkey, Lord knows when we shall come back, Breezes foul, & tempests murkey, May unship us in a crack, But since life at most a jest is, As Philosophers allow Still to laugh by far the best is, Then laugh on—as I do now, Laugh at all things Great & small things, Sick or well, at sea or shore,

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While we‘re quaffing Let‘s have laughing Who the Devil cares for more? Save good wine, & who would lack it? Even on board the Lisbon Packet. (BLJ, I, 213)

Besides the dynamic sense of humor prevailing in these lines, the sense of humor which would flavor most of his major poems to come, implied in the act of laughing ―at all things/Great & small things,‖ is the initial process of self-liberation. ―Laughing at,‖ like ―laughing with,‖ indicates the self‘s relief of constraints and burdens. Furthermore, it seems that the farther Byron is from his Western self, the closer he gets to achieving his goal. ―I dislike England, & the farther I go the less [I] regret leaving it,‖ he writes to Hanson from Patras (BLJ, I, 234). On the other hand, his sojourn in the East provided him with the most pleasing and evocative of times. The blue skies and the warm climate, besides the beauty of nature and the wealth of cultural background, gave Byron a sense of tranquility, satisfaction and bliss, which he never felt before during his residence in England. To Robert Charles Dallas, Byron writes, ―However, this circumstance will not interrupt my tranquility beneath the blue skies of Greece‖ (BLJ, I, 248). In Prevesa, he writes to Hanson, ―I am alive‖; in a letter to his mother from Constantinople, he writes, ―— I have not been disappointed or disgusted, I have lived with the highest and the lowest‖ (BLJ, I, 231 and 240; II, 7–13). He was admired, respected, and loved by all who met and served him. His sincere participation with the local natives, with their manners of life and traditions, and with the warm Eastern climes, enabled him to start social and cultural relational interactions based on genuine interest and love. His self was for the first time confronted with a different but agreeable other, and that enabled him to live his most immediate and intense states of being, states which formed the core subject-matters of his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and later on Don Juan, states of self-liberation and self-formation. If as Hazlitt contends in The Spirit of the Age that ―Intensity is the great and prominent distinction of Lord Byron‘s writings‖ (696; also see O‘Neill, 165–171), and if intensity is a consequence of mobility, which according to Jerome McGann is sensibility involv-

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ing ―a structure of social relations‖ (―Mobility,‖ 71), then Byron‘s quests in the East represent social and relational interactions essential for disclosing self, which in turn is prerequisite for selfliberation. In this respect, the East set his enclosed self and his creative genius free. Indeed, the East was the agent which ended the first chapter of his life and opened a new and pleasant one. Byron returned to England to sink deep into the dungeons of his Western self. Bitter fame disrupted rather than constructed his social inter-relational activities. Financial and personal problems vexed him, and the unexpected death of his mother, of Matthews and of Edleston darkened his soul. All his personal and public affairs were scanned by a public interested in gossip and scandal. Apart from a few of his closest friends, his personal relations were marked by tensions and strains. He begged his close friends to help him out of his loneliness and self-enclosure: ―I want a friend,‖ ―I am very lonely, & should think myself miserable,‖ ―I am solitary,‖ ―I am passing solitary,‖ ―I look at death as a relief from pain,‖ ―I am quite alone‖; the examples are numerous, but finally he bursts out in a letter to Hodgson, ―Your climate kills me; I can neither read, write, or amuse myself, or anyone else. My days are listless, and my nights restless; … I don‘t know that I shan‘t end with insanity‖ (BLJ, II, 68, 70, 77, 79, 89, 93, and 111). Byron‘s fear of looking inside his Western Self to see what he does not like and his resort to writing as a means for escaping from himself forms the main argument of Jean Hall‘s article, ―The Evolution of the Surface Self: Byron‘s Poetic Career‖ (135–57). In Western society Byron saw a reflection of what he dislikes most in his Western self, loneliness and isolation. However, his recollections of the East provided him with self-consolation and saved him from his Western self by recreating the Eastern other in his Oriental tales. The remembered joys of the East drove him to write: Fair clime! Where every season smiles Benignant o‘er those blessed isles, Which, seen from far Colonna‘s height, Make glad the heart that hails the sight. (CPW, II, Giaour, ll. 7–10)

Those Eastern climes Byron recreates in his Oriental tales were representations of the Garden of Eden, where the spirit is free and blissful. This paradise-like setting appears in The Bride of

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Abydos, in The Corsair, and in Don Juan, all of which represent quests for self-liberation and self-formation. Further, the Eastern characters of these works represent real Easterners, with whom Byron had built units of relational transactions based on love during his residence in the East. Indeed, the act of creating these characters is itself an interactional relational process in which Byron‘s self, physically distanced from the Eastern other, sought spiritual engagement with that same other through the creative experience. Critics agree that Byron‘s creative genius is a product of intense states of experience, which occur when Self lives aesthetic and exulted moments of the fusion of Self with Other; this of course entails the withdrawal of Self from itself. Byron writes: ―‘Tis to create, and in creating live/A being more intense" (CPW, II, Childe, III, Stz. 6). The other here is not the East but a poem or the act of writing poetry, and the creative experience itself represents a quest for self-liberation. When Byron asserts that ―With those countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end,‖ he himself confirms that the East stimulated him to create and live ―A being more intense‖. The Eastern world and its cultures, then, provided Byron with the opportunity to activate and nourish his poetic genius. One must not forget that Byron‘s masterworks, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Oriental tales, and Don Juan, were written during or after his Eastern tours and that some of their essential backgrounds and subject matters are from the East. Byron‘s Harold, Beppo and Juan, like their creator, have been on the spot. Their quests for selfliberation and, consequently, self-formation represent the vital quest of their creator. Before his first Oriental tour, Byron‘s literary production was immature, not because he did not have poetic talent, but because this same talent was imprisoned in Western confines and preoccupied with private and social ordeals and agonies, which themselves deterred him from higher poetic achievements. His scenes and themes depicted a world he had detested ever since his childhood. His poetic incantation then was at the stage of formation, but it was deterred by the dryness in his life of genuine relational interactions capable of setting his self free. Before Byron set out on his second Eastern quest, he yearned passionately to go back to the East; his letters include countless references to such a desire, but certainly, the most decisive one is in a letter to Hodgson in which he affirms:

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD In the spring of 1813 I shall leave England forever. Everything in my affairs tends to this, and my inclinations and health do not discourage it. Neither my habits nor constitution are improved by your customs or your climate. I shall find employment in making myself a good Oriental scholar. I shall retain a mansion in one of the fairest islands, and retrace, at intervals, the most interesting portions of the East. (BLJ, II, 75)1

Byron distances himself, rather liberates himself, from his Western self by replacing the possessive pronoun ―our‖ by ―your‖ in ―your customs or your climate.‖ Thus, he no more considers himself a part of the Western world. Also he expresses his desire to become an Oriental scholar; this renders his interest in the East genuine. Byron‘s yearning for self-liberation was fulfilled in 1816, when he left England, this time to bury his heart in the Eastern soil which he loved, and after he had established himself as the spokesman of freedom. The cause of Greece won over his heart and gave him the opportunity to practically seek the liberation of others, itself an indication of a free self. Byron writes in Don Juan, Canto III: I dream‘d that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persian‘s grave, I could not deem myself a slave. (CPW, V, 189)

His dream implies, if anything, that Byron‘s sense of the freedom of Self concurs with the freedom of Other. In other words, the poet could not ―deem‖ himself free as long as Greece was not. To Byron, freedom is not only a state of the mind and soul; it is also a practical state of being. And the real quest for selfliberation is both practical and spiritual. J. Drummond Bone confirms that ―In practical matters his [Byron‘s] conception of freedom was most often negatively defined—it was freedom from political, social or economic oppression, freedom from convention, 1

262.

Also see BLJ, 85, 94, 95, 137, 141, 163, 164, 181, 190, 200, 261, and

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19

freedom from hypocrisy, cant, humbug,‖ and ―The notion of freedom as the rejection of restraint produces the image of the hero as a social rebel or social outcast, for perhaps curiously the two work interchangeably‖ (166 and 168). Bone also asserts that ― in Childe Harold Canto I and II, or The Giaour, or Corsair, or even Don Juan, social exile is virtually a precondition of rebelliousness or rebellious social criticism‖ (168). This is to say that social distance is a prerequisite for social criticism, which itself represents a sense of the self‘s liberation from that social other. Byron then had to physically distance his poetic characters from their own societies, just as he distanced himself from British society by traversing Eastern climes. As mentioned above, if freedom of the self or self-liberation is a relational process evolving an interaction with an outward other, then self-liberation is social liberation. The acts of rebellion against, and fusion with Other as means for defining and liberating Self apply to Byron the man and poet since ―Poetry, as a foray out of the self and into the world, ‗brackets‘ that world, relocates its horizons of meaning, and temporarily liberates the poet‖ (Snyder, 34). As much as knowledge of the world liberates Self, lack of knowledge encloses and inhibits it; thus, it can no more interact or counteract with the world of Other. A poet-satirist or a poet-passionate, like Byron, must be fitted out with the self of a free agent capable of defying or assimilating cultural restraints and traditions. Byron‘s search for standards of appraisal in the West and in the East represents a quest for self-formation and self-liberation, since one must first define and liberate oneself to become a liberator of others. Such an act entails an attempt to establish a hold on the world, not only on that which frames Self within its definite boundaries (in Byron‘s case the Western world) but also with a world of difference, which to Byron, was the Eastern world. Thus, by traversing the Eastern other, Byron escaped from the madhouse of Shelley‘s ―Julian and Maddalo‖ and to a certain extent from Bonnivard‘s dungeon; he also escaped the Western Other he projected in English Bards and Scottish Reviewers and in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He liberated himself from inner and outer agonies, which confined his soul and mind. Byron‘s eagerness to embrace all that is without the Western world and to become one with difference is an attempt to ―tame the chaos,‖ to use Coleridge‘s phrase, in his Western self. ―Towards this end,‖ Robert Lance Snyder says, ―Byron utilizes the travelogue genre [in Childe Harold] to distance

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himself from the phantasmagoria of the ‗world‘ and achieve a fresh perceptive on himself‖ (26). But for my own purposes, I would rephrase the above statement to read: ―Byron utilizes his personal travels in the East to distance himself from his Western world, his Western self, and to achieve a fresh perspective on himself.‖ ―The young writer on the threshold of his career, enabled by absence from England and exposure to foreign culture to take a fresh look at his original environment, feels the need to analyze society and his relationship to it,‖ says W. Ruddick (119). It is a known fact that Byron would not have had written his travelogues or even achieved a sense of poetic wholeness had he not toured the East twice in his lifetime. As Tintern Abbey became more like a symbolic framework for defining Wordsworth‘s self, the East became Byron‘s sanctuary of his self. ―Places are for Byron always both something in themselves and a testing-ground for the imagination,‖ says Vincent Newey (166). To Byron the East was a kind of sanctuary in which he would confess his innermost self and find personal relief and freedom. The East was his muse; it inflamed his poetic inspiration and provided him with the opportunity to experience new realms of knowledge. Indeed, Byron perceived the West as a prison, which confined his soul and his poetic genius. Byron needed something to save him from his Western self. He needed to find his own space in the world. He needed the East. In this respect, Byron‘s East was his testing place because in it he could steer toward selfliberation and self-formation, which are his ultimate personal and artistic goals. Byron‘s Eastern tours provided him with the opportunity to steer the contours of his selfhood.

BYRON AND OLYMPIA ―Welcome, welcome, ye dark-blue waves!‖ (CPW, II, Childe, I, Stz. 10, l. 194)

At the beginning of this article, I emphasize the terms ―freedom,‖ ―discovery,‖ and ―adventure‖ because these are not only strongly interrelated but also form the crux of the Olympic spirit which prevailed in ancient Greece, or what, in this study, I call ―The Land of Olympia.‖ Only a free soul is capable of adventure, which enables man to discover realities and capabilities of Self and Other. Adventure and discovery are best fulfilled when Self goes beyond the predictable and customary to face the unknown—here one must not forget that the unknown is sometimes hidden deep in the mysteries of Self. A free soul is saturated with a desire to roam beyond the traditional horizons in the limitless spaces of the inner and the outer worlds. A free soul renders man fully alert and alive every instance of his/her life. Self then experiences the intensity of life and consequently has the opportunity to discover its own limitations, abilities, and potentials. In this respect, a free soul lies at the core of the Olympic spirit, which cannot survive and nourish in an inhibited, passive Self; it rather needs a soul like Dionysus‘s and Oedipus‘s for the first was soaked with the love for freedom, and the second, with the love for adventure. Both were nourished with a desire for competing with Self and with Other in search of the ultimate physical and spiritual capabilities and limitations. Although the surface goal of the Olympic spirit is to achieve distinction, the basic purpose is self-discovery. The Olympic spirit is one with a willed effort to live one‘s most intense spiritual and physical moments; but most importantly, it is a quest for higher human values and for one‘s place and space in the world. Considering the above, one cannot overlook the strong ties between the Olympic spirit and the Romantic one. The first, like

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the second is infatuated with an eagerness for freedom, adventure, discovery, and self-realization. The Romantic quest is geared towards self-awareness and self-formation and towards living the most intense, glorious, and glimmering instances of life— Wordsworth‘s ―spots of time‖ are typical examples. When the Romantics looked for a model of a spirit saturated with love, courage, and enthusiasm, their eyes turned to ancient Greece, to its ancient spirited people and culture. And indeed, the emergence of Romantic Hellenism was a result of a Romantic eagerness to reconstruct the heroism of ancient Greece, to embrace a world of social and political justice and freedom, and to promote the Grecian moralistic and aesthetic perfection.2 And it seems clear to me that the revival of the ode genre in Romantic poetry could be directly related to Romantic Hellenism. Here, one must not forget that Pindaric odes were specially written to celebrate the glory of the Olympic spirit and to praise the victories of the athletes participating in the games held in Olympia, Nemea, Delphi, and Isthmus of Corinth. Coleridge‘s best odes celebrate the competition of Self with Self; Keats‘s odes commemorate the triumph of art over death, and Shelley‘s odes mark the revival of the Romantic revolutionary spirit. The Romantics‘ interest in reviving the Olympic spirit in the Land of Olympia was a genuine interest in the models and ideals set by the ancient Greeks, models and ideals which fit their spiritual and mental aspirations. In this respect, I contend that the Olympic spirit is a Romantic spirit, and the opposite is true. Lord Byron‘s quest for the Olympic spirit in the Land of Olympia manifested itself in two forms: the first was personal; the second, literary. Byron‘s travels to the East and especially to Greece, I believe, were conscious quests for freedom, adventure, and discovery; i.e., quests for the Olympic spirit in his personal life and in the world of Other. On a private level, he became more than ever aware of his own physical and intellectual capabilities and limitations; on a broader level and to his disappointment, he found Among Romantic works, Friedrich Hölderlin‘s Hyperion, Lord Byron‘s Don Juan and Oriental tales, Shelley‘s Hellas, and Keats‘s ―Ode on a Grecian Urn,‖ besides several other works expose the Olympic spirit at its best and worst. 2

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the Olympic spirit lost in the land of Olympia amidst men‘s destructive competitions to procure wealth and power, so he ardently tried to revive the Olympic spirit in the Land of Olympia; his works written during or after his pilgrimages to Greece testify the above mentioned. But first, I will discuss Byron‘s personal quest for the Olympic Spirit. That Byron‘s sojourn in Greece revived the Olympic spirit in his personal life is obvious in his personal adventures and his physical feats and achievements. In Greece, Byron felt happy and free. He was long awaiting the opportunity to set on a pilgrimage in search for freedom, adventure, and discovery away from his traditional milieu. He left his homeland to the warm world of Greece to experience intensity of emotional and physical feelings, as well as overpowering intellectual moments; by living these moments, he discovered his own potentials and his capabilities and became more aware of the world around him and his own space in it. Leslie Marchand emphasizes Byron‘s sense of adventure when approaching the Land of Olympia in the following lines: Byron and Hobhouse took the opportunity to sail on the brigof-war Spider, which was to convoy a fleet of British merchant vessels to Patras and Prevesa. They left on September 19 [1809]. While the ship plowed through the blue Ionian Sea, Byron felt the excitement of adventure as he neared the islands and then the mainland of Greece. (Portrait, 68)

Once he stepped on Greek Land, he wrote to Robert Charles Dallas, ―I would be a citizen of the world‖ (BLJ, I, 248). He rode out the second day through the olive groves to visit the ruins of Nicopolis. Later he arrived in Jannina, where he met Ali Pacha and his grandsons. On the strenuous journey to Tepelene, he and his companions were caught up by sudden thunder-storms and heavy rain, but Byron enjoyed the whole adventure while Hobhouse detested it. Upon leaving Jannina, Byron experienced one of the most thrilling adventures in his life; he writes to his mother: Two days ago I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship of war, owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew, though the storm was not violent. Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Alla; the captain burst into tears and ran below deck, telling us to call on God; the sails

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD were split, the main-yard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, and all our chance was to make Corfu, which is in possession of the French, or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) 'a watery grave.' I did what I could to console Fletcher, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak), and lay down on deck to wait the worst. I have learnt to philosophise in my travels; and if I had not, complaint was useless. Luckily the wind abated, and only drove us on the coast of Suli, on the main land, where we landed, and proceeded, by the help of the natives, to Prevesa again; but I shall not trust Turkish sailors in future, though the Pacha had ordered one of his own galliots to take me to Patras. I am therefore going as far as Messolonghi by land, and there have only to cross a small gulf to get to Patras. …I could tell you I know not how many incidents that I think would amuse you, but they crowd on my mind as much as they would swell my paper. (BLJ, I, 229–230)

This incident made Byron aware of his capability to control himself and even to reflect amidst the most strenuous and dangerous moments of his life. In fact, it is clear that he enjoyed the intensity of those moments, which became later sparks spiriting his poetry. His visits of Messolonghi, Corinth, Megara, and Delphi and their ancient ruins were as exciting as his sojourn in Athens, where he toured the Acropolis and other ancient sites, which haunted his dreams from boyhood. After his visit to Turkey, Byron returned to Athens and stayed briefly in his old courters with the Macri family; he then moved to a convent in Athens run by the Capuchin and writes to Francis Hodgson: —I am living in the Capuchin Convent, Hymettus before me, the Acropolis behind, the temple of Jove to my right, the Stadium in front, the town to the left, eh, Sir, there‘s a situation, there‘s your picturesque! Nothing like that, Sir, in Lunnun, no not even the Mansion House. (BLJ, II, 37)

While in Athens, he swam daily at Piraeus and visited archeological sites; he also mixed with different peoples and participated in the local life of the Greeks. He even saved a Turkish girl from eminent death, an incident which left its traces on one of his

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Oriental tales, The Giaour, which according to Leslie Marchand clearly exhibits ―the intensity of the [Byron‘s] experience‖ (Portrait, 90). But perhaps the most interesting adventure parading Byron‘s genuine Olympic spirit was his swimming the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos. On May 3rd, 1810, he and Lieutenant Ekenhead swam the cold and challenging waters of the channel. Byron reported the adventure to Henry Drury: This morning I swam from Sestos to Abydos. The immediate distance is not above a mile, but the current renders it hazardous;—so much so that I doubt whether Leander's conjugal affection must not have been a little chilled in his passage to Paradise. I attempted it a week ago and failed,—owing to the north wind, and the wonderful rapidity of the tide,—though I have been from my childhood a strong swimmer. But, this morning being calmer, I succeeded, and crossed the 'broad Hellespont' in an hour and ten minutes. (BLJ, I, 237)

A great adventure and feat, it was, though Byron‘s words imply a sense of ridicule. However, there is no doubt that this adventure revived his sense of adventure and self-discovery as he competed with none other but himself. The frequency of his references to this adventure in his letters to his friends and mother and its commemoration in a poem, ―Swimming from Sestos to Abydos,‖ attest the great impact of this feat on his personal life and poetic career. To Hobhouse, he relates his great happiness and satisfaction for being in Athens and for having visited Olympia though sick (BLJ, II, 13 and 16); he summarizes his ventures in the Land of Olympia in a letter to Francis Hodgson: I swam from Sestos to Abydos. —This, with a few alarms from robbers, and some danger of shipwreck in a Turkish Galliot six months ago, a visit to a Pacha, a passion for a married woman at Malta, a challenge to an officer, an attachment to three Greek girls at Athens, with a great deal of buffoonery and fine prospects, form all that has distinguished my progress since my departure from Spain. (BLJ, I, 240)

The impact of his Olympic ventures on his spiritual and educational Self is quite clear in a letter to his mother:

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us, to set our young men abroad, for a term, among the few allies our wars have left us. (BLJ, I, 240)

The above implies, if anything, Byron‘s conviction that selfdiscovery and awareness are consequences of adventure and travel. On his second trip to the Land of Olympia in 1823, Byron landed in the Island of Cephalonia and took residence in Metaxata and visited the adjacent Island of Ithaca before he moved to Messolonghi, where he was received like a ―Messiah,‖ as Marchand asserts (Portrait, 428); i.e., like a revolutionary leader and savior from Ottoman tyranny. And a savior, he was. Byron met with the Greek spirited leaders, helped organize and finance their revolution, and finally died in the Land of Olympia—though of sickness—serving the Greek cause for liberation and independence. In this respect and on a personal level, he not only exhibited his finest and most ardent Olympic spirit but also revived it in the hearts and minds of thousands of Greeks and free souls around the world. On the literary level, both trips to the Land of Olympia provided the young and spirited poet with enough intellectual stimulation and nourishment to soar high above his contemporaries in the skies of poetry. This is stressed by Stephen Coote, who among several other critics, believed that ―It was Greece that made Byron a poet and turned an itch for rhyme into the compulsion of a genius‖ (Coote, 22). The poetry of life, which well describes most of his poetic works, is produced by the intensity of the life lived. And intensity is a consequence of adventure and discovery or mobility, which according to Jerome McGann is intense sensibility involving ―a structure of social relations‖ (―Mobility,‖ 71). Byron‘s adventures in Greece—his mingling with the Greeks and their traditions and culture, his roaming amongst the ancient ruins, his sailings from one island to another, his baptism in the Ionian and Aegean seas and the waters of the Hellespont, and most importantly, his patriotic and influential participation in the Greek fight for independence— represent intense social and relational interactions essential for disclosing Self and for the creation of a highly spirited poetic works. And since the formation of a spirited literary self requires an idea-

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lized model to stimulate it and set it free, Byron took the Land of Olympia and all that was associated with it—its people, its mythology, its geography and climate, and its ancient history and culture—as his literary models. Those models formed the subject-matter of some of his major works like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan, the Oriental tales, and a few of his shorter poems.3 ―Oh, thou! in Hellas deem‘d of heav‘nly birth,/Muse!‖ are Byron‘s opening words in Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. His calling for the Greek Muse of Poetry to aid him in a poem, which made him famous overnight, is a powerful indication of the impact of his Grecian adventures on his poetic development and feats. However, he expresses his disappointment at the fading glory of Greece when he writes that it‘s ―Glory fly her glades‖ (CPW, II, Canto I, Stz. 64, l. 656), and when he introduces Canto II, with his famous lines: Ancient of days! august Athena! where, Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were: First in the race that led to Glory's goal, They won, and pass'd away—is this the whole? (CPW, Childe, Stz. 2, ll. 9–14)

He then reminds Greece of its ancient glory versus its present fallen state and asks a series of questions: Who now shall lead thy scatter'd children forth, And long accustom'd bondage uncreate? Not such thy sons who whilesome did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Therompylae's sepulchral strait— Oh! Who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurota's banks, and call thee from the tomb? Spirit of Freedom! When on Phyle's brow The term ―Olympic‖ and its derivatives are mentioned at least eight times in his poems, The Corsair, I, l. 440; The Curse of Minerva, l. 238; The Prophecy of Dante, III, l. 158; The Deformed Transformed, II, 228; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV, l. 663; Don Juan, V, l. 21; Sardanapalus, II, l. 184; and The Island, II, 287. 3

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD Thou sat'st with Thrasybulus and his train, Couldst thou forebode the dismal hour which now Dims the green beauties of thine Attic plain? (CPW, II, Childe, Canto II, Stz. 72 and 74, ll. 695–705)

Perhaps Byron‘s death in Messolonghi provided answers to all of these questions because it exposed his disinterested sacrifices and his boundless courage, both of which dwell only in the free spirited. But Byron provided the answers to his questions when he addresses the ―Spirit of Freedom!‖ and beseeches it to invade the hearts and minds of the current Greeks as it did with the ancient ones. He goes as far as telling the Greeks how to revive the Olympic spirit in their land: ―Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?‖ (Canto II, Stz. 76, l. 721) Taking the phrase ―must strike the blow‖ in its literal sense implies accepting the challenges and risks involved in starting a revolution against the oppressor. However, taking this phrase on the spiritual level, it implies destroying the oppressor of Self and setting it free; this entails a willed, strong desire to change and a deep perception of the unlimited capabilities of Self. Only then, fear of change is abolished, and Self becomes free. On the mental level, the phrase implies making significant decisions to fulfill one‘s wishes. But wishes remain wishes unless sought via strong conviction and willed perusal. As mentioned above, the Olympic spirit cannot survive under oppression, hypocrisy, and cant. In Greece, Byron found the Olympic spirit smashed by man‘s political and religious conflicts and encounters. The Ottomans reduced it to a kind of competition or struggle for possession and power. Byron‘s disappointment at the current state of Greece and his wish to revive the spirit of freedom, the Olympic spirit in Greece, is also expressed in Don Juan, in a famous song, ―The Isles of Greece‖: The mountains look on Marathon— And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dream'd that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem myself a slave. (CPW, II, Childe, Canto III, Stz. 3)

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The look downward from the mountains at Marathon and from Marathon at the sea represent a look at the fallen state of Greece. However, Byron does not accept this state and looks upwards at Marathon and the mountains shading it and dreams of a free Greece, of a revival of its glory. Besides, his dream implies, if anything, his sense of being himself a Greek seeking freedom for the Greeks. Though his dream was not fulfilled during his life, but his words inspired the freedom fighters in the Land of Olympia to wake up and revive the Olympic spirit in their minds and hearts. He helped them financially and spiritually, he sold his Newstead Abbey to support their revolution against the Ottomans, and he traveled long distances implanting the Olympic spirit in their hearts. Byron‘s Oriental tales reflect the futility of the destructive power of these encounters/competitions for domination, possession, and power. Leila in The Bride of Abydos, Zuleika in the Giaour, and Medora, who can sing, dance, and tell tales of fair Olympia, in the Corsair, are victims of the possessiveness of those who claim to love them. The three female characters are represented by Byron as rays of hope sparkling in the midst of destructive competitions. The three must die or suffer because they cannot survive in a world devoid of freedom, of the spirit of Olympia. The three are sacrifices that must be made to restore the Olympic flame in the hearts of the Greeks. Gulnare, on the other hand, lives with the bitter realization that true love cannot dwell but ―with the free‖ (Corsair II, l. 502). To Byron, as long as Greece suffers from the domination of the Ottomans, oppression replaces love, and destruction replaces the Olympic spirit. Finally, I must reconfirm that ―Intensity‖ characterized Byron‘s life in the Land of Olympia. ―Intensity‖ was an essential Romantic feature; it also lied at the core of the Olympic spirit and competition. In this sense, the Olympic spirit caressed the Romantic spirit and the spirit of Byron. Looking for his own distinctive space in the world of the Olympic heroes, Byron sought the Land of Olympia because it was a testing place where he could steer towards selfliberation and self-formation, towards discovery and adventure, and towards the revival of the Olympic spirit in his personal life and in the Land of Olympia. These, I believe, were his ultimate personal and artistic goals. Can we not then consider Byron‘s ad-

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ventures in Greece as instances of willed ―Intensity‖ as is the case with the Olympic experience?

BYRON’S VIRTUAL TOUR OF LEBANON There is no doubt that the countries Byron visited or resided in during his first uncompleted Oriental pilgrimage had a notable impact on his personality and poetic career. Especially remarkable and influential were his visits to Greece and Turkey, both of which rendered him ―a citizen of the world‖ and contributed enormously to his poetic career, especially after his composition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Oriental tales. But Byron‘s initial plan for his Eastern tour was not limited to the countries mentioned above; indeed, it included other Eastern regions like Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Persia and India.4 In a letter to John Cam Hobhouse, from Athens, in early February, 1811, Byron writes: ―Dear Cam,— My firman for Syria & Egypt being arrived I am off in Spring for Mount Sion, Damascus, Tyre & Sidon, Cairo & Thebes‖ (BLJ. II, 9). Byron, however, could not fulfill his travel wishes for lack of funds and for personal problems in his homeland. This work creates a Byronic virtual tour of only a small but significant part of the East Byron was eager to visit, Lebanon. I base this virtual tour on Byron‘s knowledge of and interest in this region, especially that in his major works he makes several references to Lebanon, and on the actual accounts of contemporary travelers whom Byron knew very well. If anything, this Byronic virtual tour of Lebanon reinforces my assumption that his major works, especially the travelogues and his Oriental tales, would have undoubtedly undergone a tremendous expansion and change had he visited this region. But first, one must ask the following question: What would drive Byron and other Western travelers to visit a region such as Lebanon during the early nineteenth century? I believe there are 4

See BLJ, I, 135, 151, 172, 175, 234, and 255.

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several reasons, but two seem to be major: First, the evergreen and paradise-like Mount Lebanon with its Biblical Cedar Trees, its Bekaa Valley and the ruins of Baalbek (Heliopolis or the City of the Sun), and its coastal Phoenician cities of Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre along the Eastern Mediterranean, would impress Western travelers because of their splendor and magnificence and because they authenticate the histories of great Eastern empires and civilizations; second, the geographical location of the region with its sea ports rendered it a gateway to the Middle and Far East, but especially to the Holy Land. Byron read about Lebanon first in the Bible and then in histories and travel books, and those were so numerous that to refer to all of them would demand a wider scope than this work, all the reason why I refer to John Burckhardt‘s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1819).5 Byron knew the works of this Swiss Orientalist well enough to consider him one of three giants of his time—the other two were William Browne and Mungo Park (Minta, 68). But to predict the people, routes, and sites, which would have attracted Byron‘s attention is to make dubious speculations regarding a traveler endowed with an excessive sensibility, a sharp inquisitiveness, and a temperamental character. Still, to make this virtual tour more 5 The works that are marked with asterisks (*) are mentioned in Byron‘s letters, journals, and notes and are listed in the 1816 sale catalog of Byron‘s library: Castellan, A. L. Moeurs, Usages Costumes des Othomans, et Abrégé de Leur Histoire (1812). Clayton, Sir Richard. Critical Inquiry into the Life of Alexander the Great (1763). Curtius, Quintus. History of Alexander (n.d.). D‘Ohsson, Mouradja. Tableau Générale de l’empire Othoman (17871790). Eton, William. A Survey of the Turkish Empire (1798). Faber, George Stanley. Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri or the Great Gods of Phoenicia (1803). Hill, Aron. A Full Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709). *Hooke, Nathaniel. Roman History (1810). *Hope, Thomas. Costume of the Ancients (1809). Meletius of Janina. Ancient and Modern Geography(1728). *Moreri, Louis. Grand Dictionnaire Historique (1759). Thornton, Thomas. The present State of Turkey (1807). *D‘Herbelot, Barthélémy. Bibliothèque Orientale (1776). *Tales of the East (1812). *Browne, William. Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria (1807). Burckhardt, John. Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1819). Chandler, Richard. Travels in Asia Minor and Travels in Greece (1775-1776). *Clarke, Edward Daniel. Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa (1810-1821).

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realistic, I must base my speculations on the visits of a well known British liberal and turbulent traveler, Lady Hester Stanhope, whom Byron met briefly in Athens. The authenticity of my speculations become more realistic because during the same period Byron acquired his firman to tour this region visited by both Burckhardt and Lady Stanhope, especially the sites Byron mentions in his works. Besides, several common points relate the personal characters and behavior of Byron and Lady Stanhope, though they both professed their disregard of each other. In early September, 1810, Byron met Lady Hester Stanhope for a few days after her arrival in Athens on her way to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Lebanon. The meetings between the Lady and the Lord were not impressive. A month after, Byron describes his feelings towards Lady Hester to Hobhouse: I saw the Lady Hesther Stanhope at Athens, and do not admire 'that dangerous thing a female wit'. She told me (take her own words) that she had given you a good set-down at Malta, in some disputation about the Navy; from this, of course, I readily inferred the contrary, or in the words of an acquaintance of ours, that 'you had the best of it'. She evinced a similar disposition to argufy with me, which I avoided by either laughing or yielding. I despise the sex too much to squabble with them, and I rather wonder you should allow a woman to draw you into a contest, in which, however, I am sure you had the advantage, she abuses you so bitterly. I have seen too little of the Lady to form any decisive opinion, but I have discovered nothing different from other she-things, except a great disregard of received notions in her conversation as well as conduct. I don't know whether this will recommend her to our sex, but I am sure it won't to her own. (BLJ, II, 21)

On the other hand, Lady Stanhope thought that Byron had a strange character, … one time he was mopish, and nobody was to speak to him; another, he was for being jocular with everybody. Then he was a sort of Don Quixote, fighting with the police for a woman of the town; and then he wanted to make himself something great. … He had a great deal of vice in his looks—his eyes set close together, and a contracted brow. (Qtd. in Marchand, Portrait, 91)

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These unenthusiastic views, however, should not imply that they did not have a mutual admiration for each other. It is claimed that Byron knew about Lady Stanhope‘s expected arrival in Athens and intentionally took a swim on that specific day to meet her on her arrival. On the other hand, Lady Stanhope inquired about Byron‘s affairs in Greece and was acquainted with the event of the Turkish girl he saved from death. Also, without mentioning him, she professed in her memories that people with a lame foot are usually very intelligent (Memories in Tait Magazine). This cautious admiration, I believe, may be a result of a Self meeting a similar Other; though it admires this Other which mirrors it, it reacts cautiously towards it. One can call it a kind of protectiveness against a competitor, or a kind of ―hatred [which] is the keynote in the couple‘s passionate melody‖ (Kristeva, 222). In the case of Byron and Lady Stanhope, this ―passionate melody,‖ I believe, is a cautious but hidden inquisitive admiration. To Byron, this woman, who had ―that dangerous thing a female wit,‖ was an (actual female rival to his male ego) object of interest for the mere fact that she had a ―dangerous thing.‖ One should not overlook the fact that Byron blended danger with the characters and actions of most of his heroes. Here brief biographical information about Lady Stanhope would clarify the above mentioned point. After the death of her uncle, William Pitt, Prime Mister of England, Lady Stanhope decided to renounce the aristocratic social life of London and embarked on a tour of the East. Like Childe Harold and his creator, she left England without any regrets to be shipwrecked during a voyage from Rhodes. Throughout her pilgrimage, she wore the Turkish dress of a bey, a dignified male title—Byron used to wear his Albanian costume—and once in Lebanon, she was honored by its people, whom she supported against the brutality of Emir Beshir, the Christian ruler of Mount Lebanon, who honored her upon her arrival in Sidon and later became her ardent enemy. She was hailed as Prophetess by the Druses she supported and was known as the ―Nun of Lebanon,‖ the ―Queen of the Desert,‖ and Al-Syt (―The Lady‖). And finally, she died in Djoun, a village a few miles up the hills from Sidon, fighting until her last breath for her liberal principles. It is particularly interesting here to note that Lady Stanhope and Lord Byron had so many similar personal experiences and tendencies. Both were aristocrats with serious family problems; both

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were moody and too proud to stoop; both were unconventional in their personal relations and affairs; both were very highly inquisitive and intellectual; both were too generous that they lived most of their lives in constant debt; both were critical of King George IV and British cant and hypocrisy; and both were involved in international politics and revolutions. Above and beyond, both preferred the shining skies of the East to the clouded skies of England, detested oppression and fought for the liberty of the oppressed, became more like a bridge between the East and the West, and finally died in the lands they loved. Accordingly, it would have been personally appealing for Byron to follow up, though in a cautious manner, on the accounts of Lady Stanhope‘s adventures in Lebanon, and it would seem natural for his Lordship to experience what her Ladyship had had he traversed the coast and mountains of Lebanon. Thus, like Lady Stanhope, Byron would have sailed to Alexandria and visited Cairo and its Pyramids before he would have headed towards Jerusalem and Lebanon. Six months after his meeting with her Ladyship and in several letters to his mother and friends, he lists first Egypt and then Syria when referring to the firman (BLJ, II, 38–41). From Cairo, Byron would have journeyed to Jaffa, then to Jerusalem to visit the Holy City, and from there to Tyre on the southern coast of Lebanon. There he would have stayed for at least two weeks to enjoy the city, to mix with its people, and to visit its ancient ruins. He would have taken daily swims in the crystal clear Mediterranean and would have roamed the narrow streets of the old souk. Also like Lady Stanhope, he would have visited the city‘s archeological sites, like the Phoenician island, which included a vast district of civic buildings, colonnades, public baths, mosaic streets and a rectangular arena, all of which date back to the Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine periods. A thirty minute walk from this area, Byron would have seen an extensive necropolis, a three-bay monumental arch, and one of the largest Roman hippodrome ever built; all date from the 2nd century AD to the 6th century. Also in Tyre, Byron would have heard about Emir Beshir, Prince of Mount Lebanon, and the prince would have later heard of Byron‘s visit via his spies, who were spread everywhere. In his poetry, Byron makes a few references to Tyre. For instance, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron makes two references to

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Tyre: the first in his apostrophe to Spain when he compares the strong resistance of Sevilla to that of Tyre when besieged by Alexander the Great early 332 BC (CPW, II, Canto I, ll. 477–485), and the second in the apostrophe to Venice when he compares Venice‘s glory to that of Tyre (CPW, II, Canto IV, ll. 118–124). In Don Juan, canto VII, Byron considers Tyre amongst the great ancient cities of Rome, Babylon, Carthage, and Nineveh (CPW, V, l. 477). The influence of his visit to this maritime Phoenician city would have certainly gone far beyond these limited references. From Tyre, Byron would have proceeded to Sidon or Sayda, where he would have been received and probably hosted by the French Consul, who resided in the city because of its significant port and trade transactions with France and who hosted Lady Stanhope upon her arrival to the city.6 Byron would have soon received an invitation from Emir Beshir to visit him in Beiteddine. And like Lady Stanhope, Byron would have been sent an escort of about 12 camels, 25 mules, a few horses, and a guard of about a dozen soldiers to accompany him to Deir-el-Kamar, where the Emir‘s minister and the inhabitants would have greeted him as a royal British prince. As the custom dictated, Byron would have spent one night in the Emir‘s guest house, and on the second day he would have met the Emir in his palace. Again like Lady Stanhope, Byron would have been captivated by the ―distinguished good-looking man in his early fifties, with his long flowing beard and large curiously light mesmeric eyes‖ (Marchand, 139). Byron would have immediately recalled his friend Ali Pacha of Albania, who had similar physical and even personal features with the Emir. Byron would have sent his mother and Hobhouse his impressions of this meeting, during which the Emir, who actually converted to Christianity, would have tried his best to exhibit his gracious hospitality and friendship and hide his oppressive and brutal nature. About the palace, Byron like the biographer of Lady Stanhope would have noticed that ―Not even in Constantinople had [he] she seen such magnificence as that of the Emir‘s palace. The walls of the courtyard were exquisitely painted by an artist from Turkey 6 Peter Cochran has a seminal article on Byron‘s relationships with consuls in Byron the Traveller.

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whose hands the prince cut off that no other but himself should enjoy his works of art‖ (Leslie, 140). Back in Sidon, Byron would have visited the relics and market places of the city, before thinking of visiting Lady Stanhope, who would have been cautious but eager to meet him. It was customary for Western travelers to visit her Ladyship in Djoun—Burckhardt and the French Byronic poet, Lamartine, were amongst those who did. Though Byron did not refer to Sidon in his works, he mentioned this metropolitan city in his letters. Of the ruins of Sidon, he would have contemplated the Sea Castle, built by the Crusaders in the early 13th century on a small island connected to the mainland by a causeway. Byron would have climbed to the top of its towers, where he would have had a panoramic view of the port and the old part of the city, which had been continuously inhabited as far back as 4000 B.C., and perhaps as early as Neolithic times (6000–4000 B.C.).7 Byron would have also visited the Great Mosque, South of the souk on the way to the Castle of St. Louis. The mosque was formerly the Church of St. John of the Hospitalers. He would have ridden along the right of the bridge on the Awali River on the northern suburbs of Sidon to study the ruins of the Temple of Eshmoun, the Greek god of medical arts.8 Then, after one or two weeks in Sidon, Byron would pay Lady Hester a protocol visit. What would have happened in the meeting with Lady Hester is hard to tell. But Byron would have certainly sent his friends, Lord Sligo and Hobhouse, who knew her Ladyship well, letters describing the meeting and reiterating his aversion of the manly and authoritative personality of this ―dangerous thing a female wit.‖ Also he would have commented negatively on her political 7 After the Phoenicians, the Persians (550–330 B.C.), the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Crusaders controlled and left their marks on the city. In the 15th century, Sidon was one of the ports of Damascus and it flourished during the 17th century when it was rebuilt by Fakhreddine II, then ruler of Lebanon. Under his protection and encouragement, French merchants set up profitable business enterprises in Sidon for trade between France and Lebanon, the reason why the French Consul resided in the city. 8 This temple was built during the Persian period (6th century B.C.) when Sidon was at its zenith.

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involvement in local affairs; on the other hand, he would have described his enjoyment for visiting the site and its beautiful garden, which overlooked the brilliantly blue Mediterranean. After his visit to Lady Hester, Byron and a dozen of the Emir‘s soldiers would leave Sidon to Baalbek and cross the Western range of Mount Lebanon to the Bekaa Valley, where he would first rest in Zahle, much like Burckhardt had.9 Zahle‘s Catholic population then was about five thousand and had five churches See Burkhardt‘s description of September 25th: ―Took a walk through the town with Sheikh Hadj Farakh. There are eight or nine hundred houses, which daily increase, by fugitives from the oppressions of the Pashas of Damascus and of the neighbouring petty tyrants. Twenty-five years ago there were only two hundred houses at Zahle: it is now one of the principal towns in the territory of the Emir Beshir. It has its markets, which are supplied from Damascus and Beirout, and are visited by the neighbouring Fellahs, and the Arabs El Naim, and El Harb, and El Faddel, part of whom pass the winter months in the Bekaa, and exchange their butter against articles of dress, and tents, and horse and camel furniture. The inhabitants, who may amount to five thousand, are all Catholic Greeks, with the exception only of four or five Turkish families. The Christians have a bishop, five churches and a monastery, the Turks have no mosque. The town belongs to the territory of the Druses, and is under the authority of the Emir Beshir, … The inhabitants, though not rich, are, in general, in independent circumstances; each family occupies one, or at most two rooms. The houses are built of mud; the roofs are supported by one or two wooden posts in the midst of the principal room, over which beams of pine-wood are laid across each other; upon these are branches of oak trees, … The people gain their subsistence, partly by the cultivation of their vineyards and a few mulberry plantations, …On the west side of the town, in the bottom of the Wady, lies the monastery of Mar Elias, inhabited by a prior and twenty monks. It has extensive grape and mulberry plantations, and on the river side a well cultivated garden, the products of which are sold to the town‘s people. The prior received me with great arrogance, because I did not stoop to kiss his hands, a mark of respect which the ecclesiastics of this country are accustomed to receive. The river of Zahle, or Berdoun, forms the frontier of the Bekaa, which it separates from the territory belonging to the Emir of Baalbec, called Belad Baalbec; so that whatever is northward from the bridge of the Berdoun, situated in the valley, a quarter of an hour below Zahle, belongs to Belad Baalbec; and whatever is south- ward, to the Bekaa.‖ 9

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and [in] the monastery of Mar Elias, where Byron would have stayed and tasted the best of the Lebanese wine produced locally by the peasants who lived on the cultivation of their vineyards. There, he would have learnt from the Prior about the continual dispute over the rights of the city and other cities in the Bekaa Valley between the Emir and the Pashas of Damascus. The next day Byron would have carried a load of wine bottles and proceeded through this fertile plateau to Baalbek. On the road, he would have seen the ever snow-white peaks of the Western and Eastern Mountain ranges protecting the valley. About 10 miles from the ancient city, he would have noticed the remaining six of the original 54 huge 22 meters Corinthian columns resting on a 4,224 square meters podium, 20 meters above the surrounding terrain. The columns surrounded the Great Temple of Jupiter, which was built in the 2nd century A.D. Upon arriving to the city of Baalbek, Byron, like Burckhardt, would have taken lodgings in the house of a Catholic priest, who superintended a parish of twenty-five Christian families. This being near the great temple, Byron would have left early in the morning to visit the site, which was considered by Burckhardt and many western travelers the most magnificent in magnitude and decoration of the Roman temples.10 Byron would have been mesmerized by the vastness of the temple and the splendor of its engravings. Next to the Temple of Jupiter stands the Temple of Bacchus, which was constructed during the first half of the 2nd century A.D. 10 See Burckhardt‘s descriptions of September 29th.: ―—I took lodgings in a small room belonging to the catholic priest, who superintends a parish of twenty-five Christian families. This being near the great temple, I hastened to it in the morning, before any body was apprised of my arrival….I observed no Greek inscriptions; there were some few in Latin and in Arabic; and I copied the following Cufic inscription on the side of a stair-case, leading down into some subterranean chambers below the small temple, which the Emir has walled up to prevent a search for hidden treasures….The temple of the Sun at Tedmor is upon a grander scale than that of Baalbec, but it is choked up with Arab houses, which admit only of a view of the building in detail. The architecture of Baalbec is richer than that of Tedmor. …The women of Baalbec are esteemed the handsomest of the neighbouring country, and many Damascenes marry Baalbec girls.‖

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The temple was and still is being remarkably well preserved. Thirtythree steps lead up to the lofty monumental gate with its ornate interior; this gate was commemorated by David Roberts in a painting, which won him membership in the Royal Academy of London. Byron would have left an engraving of his name on one of the walls of the Temple of Bacchus, much like he had done in the Acropolis of Athens and the columns of Sunion. He would have also contemplated the comparatively small Temple of Venus, which was built in the 3rd century A.D. southeast of the acropolis and the Temple of the Muses, dating from the beginning of the 1st century A.D. In his works and letters, Byron did not mention this site; however, he made twelve references (11 of which in Sardanapalus) to the Phoenician glorious god Baal, after whom the city was called. From Baalbek, Byron would have traveled westwards across the plain and up the mountains to arrive to the Biblical Cedar Forest. He would have enjoyed the road that snaked up the bare eastern slopes of Mount Lebanon presenting marvelous panoramic views at every turn. At the crest Byron would have looked down into a gigantic bowl where the Cedar grove lie. The Cedars ―stand on uneven ground, and form a small wood… of the oldest and best looking trees,‖ says Burckhardt (Travels, Oct. 3rd, 1810). Byron, who was aware of the Biblical significance of the Cedar timber which over the centuries were sought by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians, makes several references to the Cedars of Lebanon; the most impressive is in The Prophecy of Dante: The genius of my country shall arise, A Cedar towering o‘er the Wilderness, Lovely in all its branches to all eyes, Fragrant as fair, and recognized afar. (CPW, IV, 74–77)

Byron associates other references to with the Bible and with glory, majesty, and beauty (CPW, II, Bride I, l. 5; Sardanapalus V, l. 278; Cain, II, l. 397; etc.) Byron would then visit the Maronite Patriarch in Diman, a small village overlooking the Valley and Monastery of Qannoubin,

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known as the Valley of the Saints. Burckhardt describes in minute details his visit to the panoramic valley and to the Monastery engraved in the rocks.11 Byron would have stayed in Diman for a few days to study this ancient religious site before he would leave to the coastal city of Tripoli, where he would have been received and hosted by Mr. Guys, another French Consul, who was extremely attentive and hospitable to English travelers, as Burckhardt reports.12 There he would have been impressed by the sea port and See Burckhardt‘s description of October 3rd. ―In the morning I went to Kanobin; after walking for two hours and a half over the upper plain, I descended the precipitous side of a collateral branch of the valley Kadisha, and continued my way to the convent, which I reached in two hours and a half. It is built on a steep precipice on the right of the valley, at half an hour‘s walk from the river, and appears as if suspended in the air, being supported by a high wall, built against the side of the mountain. There is a spring close to it. The church, which is excavated in the rock, and dedicated to the Virgin, is decorated with the portraits of a great number of patriarchs. During the winter, the peasants suspend their silk-worms in bags, to the portrait of some favourite saint, and implore his influence for a plenteous harvest of silk; from this custom the convent derives a considerable income. Kanobin is the seat of the patriarch of the Maronites, who is at the head of twelve Maronite bishops, and here in former times he generally passed the summer months, retiring in the winter to Mar Hanna; but the vexations and insults which the patriarchs were exposed to from the Metaweli, in their excursions to and from Baalbec, induced them for many years to abandon this residence. The present patriarch is the first who for a long time has resided in Kanobin. Though I had no letter of introduction to him, and was in the dress of a peasant, he invited me to dinner, and I met at his table his secretary, Bishop Stefano, who has been educated at Rome, and has some notions of Europe. While I was there, a rude peasant was ordained a priest. Kanobin had once a considerable library; but it has been gradually dispersed; and not a vestige of it now remains. The cells of the monks are, for the most part, in ruins.‖ 12 Burckhardt report on March 3rd. that ―the commerce of Tripoli has decreased lately, in proportion with that of the entire commerce of Syria. There are no longer any Frank establishments, and the few Franks who still remain are in the greatest misery. A French consul, however, resides here, M. Guys, an able antiquary, and who was very liberal in his literary communications to us. He has a very interesting collection of Syrian medals. Mr. Catziflis, who is a Greek, is a very respectable man, and rendered 11

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the famous 12th century Saint Gilles Castle. However, I doubt that he would have stayed there for more than a few days before he would have traveled south to Byblos, one of the oldest Phoenician cities believed to have been founded by the God ―El‖ about 7,000 years ago.13 Byron does not mention Byblos in his works and letters, but he must have read about it in the travel and history books he had. From Byblos, Byron would have gone to Beirut, where he would stay for a week or so before he would have headed East toward Damascus via Zahle, the Bekaa Valley, and across Mount Lebanon‘s eastern range. The influence of Byron‘s virtual tour of Lebanon would have been unpredictable but most certainly significant. Byron would have added another Canto to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in which he would have dedicated a few Stanzas for describing the sites mentioned above. Apostrophic Stanzas to Tyre, Sidon, Baalbek, the Cedars, and Byblos would have been written, and Harold would have fallen in love with a Lebanese female from Baalbek, as they were known to be exotically beautiful, or with one in the service of Emir Beshir. In Don Juan, Byron would have sent his hero to Tyre to contemplate the ruins of this glorious ancient city and to the Cedar grove to describe the majesty of the site. Of course Juan would have met a British Lady near Sidon, an image of Lady Stanhope, and recalled his authoritative, manly mother. However, there is no doubt in my mind that Byron would have turned Emir Beshir considerable services to the English army during the war in Egypt. He is extremely attentive and hospitable to English travellers.‖ 13 From Byblos the Phoenicians traveled to Greece and offered their alphabet to the world by 800 B.C. The Assyrian, the Babylonian and the Persians held sway until the conquest of Alexander the Great, after which the city was rapidly Hellenized and Greek became the language of the local intelligentsia. During this Hellenistic Period (330-64 B.C.), residents of Byblos adopted Greek customs and culture which persisted throughout the Roman era which was to come in the first century B.C. The Romans under Pompey took over Byblos and other Phoenician cities, ruling them from 64 B.C. to 395 A.D., and built large temples, baths and other public buildings as well as a street bordered by a colonnade that surrounded the city. Later, the Byzantine dynasty took over (395-637 A.D.) to render the city a Christian bishopric.

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into a major character in another Oriental tale, which would have revealed the oppressive nature of the prince and the bravery of the Druses he oppressed. In such an Oriental tale, the Byronic hero would have been a Druze revolutionary male, probably called Maarouf, in love with an exotically beautiful Christian female, probably called Miriam, as both Druses and Christians have lived together in these mountains for ages though they had their differences. In the same tale, Byron would have also included a female British character, another image of Lady Stanhope, who would offer the lovers refuge and protection but fail when the Emir‘s soldiers would attack her stronghold and slaughter all, including the British Lady— which, I guess, would please Byron. I also believe that Byron, like Lamartine, who was fascinated by the beauty of the Cedars, would have written a special poem commemorating his visit. Besides, Byron‘s correspondence would have increased tremendously to include his remarkable impressions of his meetings and visits. To conclude, I must confirm that during his short life Byron was a restless pilgrim, and it is this life of a pilgrim that blossomed so fragrantly in his works. Had he lived longer, he would have certainly met with more people and seen more lands than the ones he wished to meet and see, and, consequently, his literature would have expanded dearly. Peter Graham confirms in one of his articles that Byron‘s ―relationship with Greek culture blended myth, history, literature, politics, travel, and travial‖ (119). I believe that had Byron actually visited Lebanon, his relationship with Lebanese culture would have left similar but less impressive blends as his real bride and love was indisputably Greece.

WESTERN EXOTICISM AND BYRON’S ORIENTALISM When Byron published his Oriental tales early in the nineteenth century, the Western fascination in the exotic Orient and Oriental produced and reproduced a tendency to impose close associations between exoticism and Orientalism to the point that both terms were considered synonymous. Maryanne Stevans explains how to nineteenth century artists, especially painters, ―exoticism and Orientalism were synonymous with brilliant, explosive colour‖; this vision of the exotic Orient, she believes, had been shaped, ―with certain notable exceptions, more by exotic imagination than by fact‖ (17 and 20). Alan Richardson asserts: Within the Western literary tradition exoticism or (what is often the same thing) Orientalism has been largely implicated in the establishment of European hegemony, cultural as well as economic and political. (175)

This chapter suggests that nineteenth-century understanding of exoticism and Orientalism is problematic and that the immediate and enormous popularity of Byron‘s Oriental tales pertains most to the Western readers‘ thirst for the exotic experience rather than to their sense of Byron‘s Oriental scholarship and/or his poetic genius. Several cultural, economic, religious and political factors forced Orientalism into an exotic Romantic mold in the minds of the Western publics. However, all of these factors meet in the common belief that the East could satisfy the Western craving for the exotic experience. On the cultural level, the Orient of the nineteenth century and before was seductively attractive and reflective of the highly imaginative and colorful world of the Arabian Nights and the Persian Tales. The Oriental tales introduced to Western publics a remote world with different colors and traditions, a world

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filled with adventures and wrapped with magic and enchantment; this world fascinated the European public because it was distant and different and not because it represented a rich culture, which had so much to offer. Only men of letters like Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, William Beckford and Lord Byron were able to appreciate the tales‘ artistic structural and cultural wealth. Martha Pike Conant was amongst the first scholars to acknowledge the tales‘ influence on those writers, who needed to escape the hard confines of neo-classical traditions. Marryanne Stevans defines Exoticism as ―the artistic exploration of territories and ages in which the free flights of the imagination were possible because they lay outside the restrictive operation of classical rules‖ (17). Those rules have for centuries been the basis of Western thought. The Western writers and artists exhausted traditional themes and views—classical views which did not afford them with bright visions of the world, and much less of their lives. The collective psychology of Western writers and artists was that of gloominess and stiffness, and the culture of the East was not only bright and wealthy, but different; it revitalized their imaginative faculties which had been restrained for centuries by classical principles. But not so for the Western public whose interest in the exotic East was a dream-like escape into other worlds. Artistically, Western paintings of the Eastern females, half covered by their veils, or half naked in their harem, printed an exotic, mysterious and/or erotic image of the Orient in the minds of the Western beholders. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, the Orient was frequently represented as a foreign female figure, ―the female Orient is metonymical reduction of what is different from and desired by the masculine European subject‖ (Lisa Lowe, 214). This infatuation with the unfamiliar female translates perfectly the sense of Western exoticism. On the economic level, the Western markets were swamped with exotic Oriental merchandise with intricate designs, bright colors, and refined materials. And for a Westerner, possessing an Oriental carpet was like possessing a flying carpet; and wearing the ―Utr Gul‖ was like traversing an Oriental rose garden. In fact, the same was true for possessing any Oriental product; for by merely possessing it, one became a victim of the illusion of possessing the exotic East.

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On the religious level, the fact that the East was the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam enhanced the Western publics‘ sense of wonder, which was sometimes mixed with grace and charm (in the case of Christianity) and sometimes, with bewilderment and contempt (in the case of Islam). Western travelers and artists who visited the East described their exotic feelings at seeing the Easterners as living portraits of the Biblical characters. One of those travelers, Horace Vernent, argued that the Arabs in their dress and manners were accurate representations of Biblical figures (Warner, 32). However, his fascination with the Arabs was limited to their exotic appearance and not to their cultural heritage. On the other hand, Islam was exotic because it was mysterious. The Muslims were believed to be either pious believers in the One and only Allah or immoral and cruel lords of the harems; and the solemn voice of the muezzin was considered as the most exotic form of prayer because of the strangeness of the muezzin‘s melody, and not because of the prayer itself. In fact, for almost all Westerners, any reference to the Orient was regarded as a reference to Islam; thus, an Oriental carpet was also an Islamic carpet. It was all the same, except that the term ―Islamic‖ as modifier seemed to excite exoticism and to sustain susceptible superiority. The degree of religious exoticism the East provided the West would have been unthinkable in images of Christian life in contemporary Europe; it would tell us something about the Westerners‘ religious illusions of the East, but far more about the states of mind of nineteenth century Europeans. On the political level, the East represented a political system based upon religion; such a political system would provoke the curiosity of the monarchs in the West who were drifting away more than ever before from religious confines. Besides, the Western expansion in Eastern territories fired imperialistic and colonial aspirations and enhanced the feeling of the superiority of Self over Other, or the West over the East, thus, embracing Self‘s feeling of superiority over the unfamiliar Other. Modern critics like Edward Said and his followers, the Saidists, were baited by this confusion. Said states that Western Orientalism dealt with the Orient ―by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient‖ (3). This approach to Orientalism, says John M.

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MacKenzie, is rather new and ―has injected considerable confusion, not only in the meaning and use of terms but also involving a repeated realignment of sympathies, which needs to be set into its wider theoretical contexts‖ (xiii). Allan Richardson believes that the Western understanding of exoticism is greatly distorted by Edward Said‘s reductionist model of Orientalism. He quotes Thomas Greene, who argued that exoticism can advance the ―vulnerability‖ of Western literary works by demystifying their cultural constructs (175). Influenced by Said, Eric Meyer believes that Byron‘s Oriental tales are fixed on the topos of the Oriental harem and on the figure of the veiled Eastern girl who stands as a synechdoche for the colonial other. . . . to assert authorial hegemony over the feminized East and bring it under the regulation of the masculine West. (659–660)

Such a statement tells, if anything, of Meyer‘s confusion of exoticism with Orientalism. This confusion is problematic because an Orientalist is considered here as an exoticist, and Orientalism is heeded as a medium for exoticism. Although the two concepts cannot be treated in complete isolation, as the one might induce the other, both terms can be treated as discrete entities. To a Westerner (considered here as the ―Subject‖ or the ―Self‖) the Orient (the ―Object‖ or ―Other‖) is exotic because it is remote and different. Byron‘s Oriental tales were to his reading public remote and different. Todorov explains: …we cherish the remote because of its remoteness. … It is a decidedly ambiguous compliment to praise others simply because they are different from myself. Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be. (265)

And praise without knowledge is what characterizes Byron‘s nineteenth century readers although in all of his Oriental and major works he provided his readers with sufficient notes explaining matter related to Eastern cultures. Indeed Byron‘s Oriental tales invigorated the exotic experience in his readers (the exotes), who wrongly considered his tales

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as expressions of exoticism. Eastern names, costumes, sites and climates, more than Eastern themes and thought, attracted the attention of Byron‘s public and stimulated their sense of exoticism. Giaffir, Selim, Zuleika, Leila, Hassan, Gulnare, Giaour, Seyd Pacha, Corsair, Medora and other Eastern characters in Byron‘s works were, to the Western publics, exotic Eastern names and/or Oriental portraits painted with the stroke of a pen; those names and characters were to be admired or abhorred from a distance. Eastern terminology related to costume like ―caftan‖, ―calpac‖, ―palampore‖, and ―turban‖ appealed to the Western public because they represented an exotic fashion and because they added an exotic spicy flavor to their language. The glamorous and warm climate of Eastern sites like Abydos, Sestos, Corinth, Constantinople, and Mecca symbolized a world distant and endowed with timeless titillation and the allure of remote civilizations. Exoticism was first coined in the nineteenth century to refer to the sense of nostalgia in the distant observer. It is evoked by the observed object; however, it generates in the subject an interest stimulated by ignorance and illusions—exaggerated illusions— rather than by knowledge. It follows that the observed, or sometimes the imagined, (the exotic Orient) stimulates in the subject, (the exote) the exotic experience, which is very highly impressionistic and subjective. ―The exotic experience is thus to be carefully distinguished from the experience of immersion in a foreign culture‖ (Todorov, 329). Such an experience is maintained by surprising spectacles in worlds of strangeness and diversity. By converting the cultural objects into spectacles, it preserves the self‘s proximity from the other and generates the subject‘s exotic pleasure. Byron‘s Western readers were like tourists in foreign lands; they would enjoy the most repellent spectacles (the drowning of Leila, the killing of Hassan, the burning of Seyd‘s Harem, etc.) as long as they were not participants. Exotic pleasure, then, is created by ―the illusion of enclosure within an exotic space,‖ and is based on the separation of the spectator from the spectacle. Byron‘s public admired the spectacle; whether Mecca or Medina contained the ―holy sepulchre‖ was the least of their concerns. Thus, they read with their eyes and preserved the pleasurable exotic experience by detaching themselves from the spectacle. A reading of Byron‘s contemporary and even modern critics would clarify how they were charmed by Byron‘s original, rather exotic, poetic style, diction, and

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representations; it would also show how critics misinterpreted his genuine interest in Oriental culture as a concern in becoming a Levantine merchant of exotic poetic material. The reviewer of the Gentleman’s Magazine comments on Byron‘s language in The Giaour: The powers of imagination and the splendors of language with which the noble Author of this tale is gifted, are known to all lovers of Romance and Poetry in the Empire. His Lordship is no common artist, and describes with no common felicity of execution. (The Romantic Reviewed, III, 1088)

Commenting on The Bride of Abydos, the reviewer of the Edinburgh Review evokes the Western sense of nostalgia for the past when he praises Byron as the only modern poet who has set before our eyes visible pictures of the present aspect of scenes so famous in story; … has spread around us the blue waters and dazzling skies––the ruined temples and dusky olives––the desolate cities, and turbaned population, of modern Attica. (The Romantic Reviewed, II, 851)

The reviewer of the Critical Review writes that in The Siege of Corinth, Byron ―is frequently sublime, vivid, animating, and affecting. Variety and distinctness of colouring are, however, the characteristics of his talents.‖ Another reviewer was impelled to say: ―we have … again eagerly pressed forward to journey with him into other climes‖ (The Romantic Reviewed, II, 960). And the reviewer of the Edinburgh Review says that, in The Corsair, Byron‘s natural magic and spell of overpowering emotions has fixed the admiration and commanded the sympathy of even his reluctant readers (The Romantic Reviewed, II, 848). None of his reviewers was able to notice that Byron‘s ability to draw such exotic pictures of the East is surpassed by his ability to put motion and life into these representations of Eastern life and cultures, an ability unobserved by his public as well. As one usually studies what he admires, admiration becomes an essential ingredient of scholarship, but admiration, with the sympathy of a reluctant or detached reader, is the basis of exoticism. Thus, it would be an oversimplification to assume that Byron‘s contemporary critics and public appreciated his Oriental scholar-

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ship, or even assimilated the Oriental culture, which Byron tried hard to expose in its most authentic and refined form in his works. The Western public considered the Oriental tales as fashionable commodities bought to be used when they desired the entertainment of the exotic experience. When the subject, then, studies this exotic experience, he is studying a Western subjective attitude; in other words, he is studying himself and not the object. Such study involves the self as a central figure and implies the sense of self superiority. In this respect, the exoticist is self-centered; he is a surprised seer and hearer and not an interested participant. Byron‘s readers at the time were exoticists and not participants. On the other hand, Orientalism is the Western subject‘s study of the object, the Orient and the Oriental, for what it might offer to advance the subject‘s knowledge; it is a study for its own sake and not only for what it evokes in the self of the subject. The Orientalist agrees with Chateaubriand, who asserts that knowledge of Other can improve knowledge of Self. Orientalism, then, is compatible with knowledge; it implies Western objective scholarship. Exoticism might be a primary step towards provoking interest in the Oriental. If this interest is then quenched by genuine investigation and study, it becomes Orientalism proper. But Byron‘s reading public was not seeking knowledge of the East; it was soliciting the exotic experience. MacKenzie goes a step further to assert that Orientalism is . . . the study of the languages, literature, religions, thought, arts and social life of the East in order to make them available to the West, even in order to protect them from occidental cultural arrogance in the age of imperialism.‖ (xii)

Vindicating Byron against the accusation of imperialistic interests, Nigel Leask states that ―Byron reduces the imperialistic Self to a level with its oriental Other‖ (4). Indeed, in Byron‘s Oriental tales East and West are placed on equal platforms. Byron describes the Oriental elements in his Eastern tales with the same poetic zeal and stamina as he describes the Western elements in his Western works. The exote, however, would sensualize his Oriental allusions much like the advertiser would sensualize his product to make it attractive. Exoticism, which is an emotional subjective response targeted at a special au-

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dience, is a motivational personal response. Byron was the least personal and most realistic amongst his contemporaries. His Oriental scholarship is implied in his meticulous concern for the authenticity of his Oriental references; it originated from his natural fidelity to fact. On one occasion, he said, ―I hate things all fiction‖ (BLJ, III, 202). On another, he told Thomas Moore, who did not visit the East yet wrote about it, ―The only advantage I have [―as to accuracy‖] is being on the spot.‖ But according to Byron, ―something more than having been across a camel‘s hump‖ is needed by an author to write authentic works (BLJ, III, 199). A writer must be faithful in his participation in and observations of Eastern culture and life. Before John Murray published The Bride of Abydos, Byron wrote to him: Dear Sir—I send you a note for the ignorant—but I really wonder at finding you among them.—I don‘t care one lump of sugar for my poetry—but for my costume [i.e., ―to use an affected but expressive word‖]—and my correctness on those points (of which I think the funeral [of Zuleika] was a proof) I will combat lustily. (BLJ, III, 165)

A few weeks later he asked Murray to check whether the Prophet was buried at Mecca or Medina (BLJ, III, 190). Irritated by Murray‘s delay, he wrote again: ―I blush as a good Mussulman to have confused the point‖ (BLJ, III, 191). Byron‘s telling statements imply, if anything, that Murray, like the contemporary reading public, was an exote himself. The above statements also insinuate that, as an Oriental scholar, Byron was impartial and that he protected the Orient against misrepresentations. Also, he was a participant; he studied the East and fused himself in its culture to comprehend that which was different in it, in order to enrich his own culture. Consequently, it was his sense of the superiority of the Oriental, the object or the other, which attracted his attention. There is no doubt that the Oriental tales written and published between 1813 and 1816 puffed out Byron‘s pocket and encouraged Thomas Moore and other Romantic writers to make use of the Orient. In fact, each of Byron‘s Oriental tales was a best seller; each broke the conventional sales records, which exceeded the expectations of Byron and his publisher, John Murray. Such ―saleability of poetry with an ‗oriental‘ flavour,‖ Nigel Leask contends, implies that ―Byron speaks like a Levantine or East India merchant

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who has tapped a lucrative source of raw materials in a newly opened up Orient‖ (13). Whereas Philip Martin argues: By building a dimension in the verse of which he [Byron] can be fairly sure his audience will remain ignorant, he is able to dissociate himself from a productive process wherein the poet has become subsumed into the trade of orientalism. (62)

Martin makes it clear that Byron was the least concerned about his readers, whom he knew to be ignorant. Leask, however, underestimate Byron‘s genuine interest in Oriental matter for its own sake. And it is an oversimplification to assume that Byron wrote his Oriental tales only to make money or to satisfy a popular demand. Byron, who did not care much for his critics and much less for his readers, is known to ridicule and trap his critics and public—much like Jonathan Swift used to do. No one scholar can deny the fact that Byron‘s personal life was to his own public exotic, and that this fact reflected on his public‘s expectations and understanding of his works. He exerted an unprecedented spell on his public, who admired him more as an exotic cult than as a poet. James Soderholm discusses Byron‘s glamour in the eyes of his public: ―The spell that made him so alluring had much to do with his readers‘ own investment in the poet‘s life and career‖ (8). Indeed, more than his poetic expressions, Byron‘s personal life and career were unconventional. Byron was neither a homogeneous member of his social class nor analogous in his personality to any contemporary literary figure. His lameness, his education, his sexual liaisons, his marriage, and his Eastern tours made him and his literary production different. Difference like exoticism surprises and attracts; it is acrimonious and defiant. Byron had, by nature, the guts to be different, and it is this difference in him that attracted and also trapped a public who was exhausted with uniformity. ―I awoke to find myself famous‖ tells about Byron‘s bewildering astonishment at the public‘s reception of his Works. The reception of The Corsair surprised Murray, who wrote to Byron: Never in my recollection has any work . . . excited such a ferment. . . . I sold on the day of publication––a thing perfectly unprecedented––10,000 copies. (Qtd. E. H. Coleridge, 217)

What was Byron‘s response:

54

LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD ––It gratifies me much that our Finale has pleased––& that the Curtain drops gracefully––. . . I enjoy my solitary self importance––in an agreeable sulky way of my own. (BLJ, IV, 44–46)

Byron was quite aware of the fact that his public would enjoy the spectacle much like they would enjoy a stage performance, and that after the ―Curtain drops gracefully,‖ this same public would seek more spectacles that would provide it with the exotic and not the cultural experience. Only scholars who had studied or visited the East appreciated Byron‘s Oriental scholarship as manifested in his Oriental tales. John Galt, who met and visited Byron in the East, writes: ―They [the Oriental tales] possess the rare and distinguished quality of being as true to fact and nature, as they are brilliant in poetical expression‖ (139). In his correspondence, Byron repeatedly stresses that the tales are written ―from reality‖ and not from his attitudes towards the East. Byron‘s main objective was to give the tales the proper local color of the East, a purpose he achieved by being faithful to the other, which has so much cultural wealth to offer. Byron participated in the object or the other to present it as it is and not as it would impress his Western audience. The confusion of exoticism and Orientalism, then, implies, if anything, that the nineteenth century reading of these terms suffered from a misunderstanding, which distorted representations and conceptions about the East. The same reading also ravaged the scholarship of genuine Oriental scholars like Lord Byron.

ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY IN BYRON’S

THE GIAOUR

―His works contain nothing but devastation, massacres, conflagrations; everything bears witness against the eternal and incorrigible barbarity of man,‖ writes Charles Baudelaire in the obituary of Eugene Delacroix in 1863 (Qtd. M. Therese Southgate, 1677). Delacroix, who based most of his paintings on personal experiences and from the works of contemporary literary figures, read Lord Byron‘s The Giaour in a French translation made by Amédée Pichot, about a month after the dramatic death of the poet in Messolonghi, Greece, in 1824. The great influence of the Oriental tale on Delacroix is evident in six paintings, two of which portray the barbaric combat at its height between and Hassan, a Western Christian and an Eastern Muslim. The paintings do not show the slaying of Hassan by Giaour, nor do they show the guilty and remorse torn Giaour confessing his crimes to a convent father. And it seems that this ―eternal and incorrigible barbarity of man,‖ which is exhibited in Delacroix‘s paintings, is intended by the French painter to shock the viewers and to stimulate them to seek peaceful alternatives to the futile and barbaric encounters between man and man. Yet, art critics who adopt Edward Said‘s polemic definition of Orientalism interpret the paintings as implying the encounter between the West and East, whereby the superiority of the Christian West over the Muslim East is established. This line of critical thinking was quite obvious in the catalogue of an exhibition staged in 1998, by the Art Gallery of New South Wales entitled, ―Orientalism: From Delacroix to Klee‖. The catalogue referred to Edward Said as the major

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―aesthetic authority,‖14 who would shed light on the covert meanings of the paintings. Edward Said claims that Orientalism was a ―Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient‖ (3). He asserts that the relationship between the West and the East was from its earliest beginning a hostile relationship between Christianity and Islam, whereby Christendom represented the European domination of the Muslim Orient (59). Eric Meyer confirms that the encounter between Hassan and Giaour in Byron‘s tale and in Delacroix‘s Battle of Giaour and Pascha represents the historical confrontation between the West and East. He goes on to assert ―The Giaour remains a fundamentally hegemonic narrative centered on the extension of Western cultural superiority over the East in an agonistic struggle of dominance‖ (670 and 676). On the other hand, Mohammed Sharafuddin, who thinks that ―Said‘s study is empirically suspect and methodologically contradictory,‖ asserts that ―the Romantic movement emerged as resistance to massive despotism, and that its writers were reacting against political and cultural centralization,‖ the reason why they had a genuine interest in other cultures (xvii). This genuine interest, especially in the Oriental culture, Sharafuddin believes, was promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s and Edmund Burke‘s openness to other cultures (xxiv–xxv). They both believed that the Romantic self developed only through the knowledge and acceptance of world cultures and not through their polarization. The Romantics were multicultural in the sense that a mixture of religions, national and international cultures (the French, the German, the Oriental, and the Far Eastern) influenced their identities. They were less interested in centralizing religions or cultures, especially because centralization almost always lead to fundamentalism, and fundamentalism almost always lead to futilitarianism, which in this study indicates senselessness, uselessness, pointlessness, vainness, and ineffectiveness. Keith Windschuttle uses this term when she discusses the impact of Edward Said on the exhibition in the introduction of her article, ―Edward Said‘s ‗Orientalism‘ Revisited,‖ in The New Criterion (January 1999): 30–38. 14

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Abdur Raheem Kidwai, slides along the same slippery sloops of Said and his followers when he asserts that East is Islam and West, Christianity. He also confirms that ―in the case of Western literary Orientalism the distortion is rooted in the unfortunate clashes between two major world faiths—Christianity and Islam‖; however, he finds that Byron‘s Orientalism deviates from the dominant conception and that Byron ―stands out from, and above, both his predecessors and contemporaries in his treatment of the Orient‖ (v and vii). He rightly confirms, ―The Giaour‘s remorse is not for any of his moral and social transgressions. He shares in equal measure the vices and weaknesses of Hassan. Byron casts them in the same mould, which rules out Giaour‘s superiority over his Oriental adversary‖ (151). It is only natural, and perhaps necessary, that critics disagree with each other as long as their criticism does not combat objectivity. Some critics have a tendency to read more than the original authors have actually written in their own texts. There is no problem with this as long as their readings contribute to a deeper level of understanding of the author and the text; but when critics formulate their own critical exegesis and read all texts accordingly, they sometimes mislead rather than guide, for they quite often overlook sections of the literary text, which do not support their critical exegesis. For instance, Eric Meyer overlooks the ―Advertisement‖ of The Giaour, where Byron sets the political background; he makes clear that the encounter is a regional one and that ―the cruelty exercised on all sides was unparalleled even in the annals of the faithful‖ (CPW, III, 39). This is a clear indication of Byron‘s dissatisfaction with all political parties involved in his tale. Byron‘s life-long struggle against oppression is general knowledge, and to read the tale as implying his siding with the Western or the Christian imperialist ambitions is not only confusing but misleading, as well. For if indeed the conflict were a religious one, then the Arnauts, a mixture of Christian and Muslim Albanian soldiers in the Turkish forces, would have fought each other rather than the Venetians. Besides, the possibility of having a love affair between a Christian Venetian and a Muslim beauty should be farfetched and unrealistic. Byron very diplomatically asserts in the ―Advertisement‖ that the tale is based on ―circumstances now less common in the East than formerly,‖ and John Galt and Leslie Marchand argue that The Giaour is founded on an actual incident in

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which Byron participated.15 Also one must never overlook the fact that Byron reports in his correspondence from the East to his mother and friends his mingling with Christians and Muslims, who not only lived together but also had common interests. From Prevesa, Byron reports to his mother how he was almost lost on a ship amidst a violent storm, during which ―— Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the Saints, the Mussulmen on Allah, the Captain burst into tears & ran below deck telling us to call on God‖ (BLJ, I, 229). In another letter to Francis Hodgson, he reports from Athens that while he was living in a Franciscan monastery ―The Waywode (or Governor of Athens) with the Mufti of Thebes (a sort of Mussulman Bishop) supped here and made themselves beastly with raw Rum, and the Padrè of the convent being as drunk as we, my Attic feast went off with great éclat‖ (BLJ, II, 27).16 The sharing of common space and of food and drink between both Christians and Muslims in the East, which was and still is a part of the daily life of Easterners, and the fact that the Albanians were a perfect mix of Christian and Muslim in the Turkish service17 defies all claims that at the time the encounter in the region was mainly religious.

15 When Byron was one day returning from daily bathe at Piraeus, he met a procession sent by the Turkish governor of Athens to carry out the death sentence on a girl Byron probably knew. The victim was convicted of illicit love; she was sewn into a sack to be cast into the sea when Byron intervened. By threats and bribery Byron saved the girl and conveyed her to safety in Thebes. Byron never gave a clear account of this incident though he believed Lord Sligo‘s report to be ―not very far from the truth.‖ For a full treatment of this event and the controversy around it, see See BL, III, 200. See also Galt, 173–74; and Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957): I, 257–58. 16 See also BLJ, II, 9, where he reports to his mother that in the East he has ―lived in the houses of Turks [Muslims], Greeks, Italians, and English [Christians], today in a palace, tomorrow in a cowhouse, this day with the Pacha, and the next with a Shepherd.‖ 17 See BLJ, I, 230, where he writes, ―I like the Albanians much, they are not all Turks, some tribes are Christians, but their religion makes little difference in their manner or conduct; they are esteemed the best troops in the Turkish service.‖

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However, currently and more than ever before, the compatibility of Christianity and Islam is being doubted by some Western critics, who greatly fall under the influence of Western and sometimes Eastern propagandist political media, or what I would like to call media-fixing. Those critics overlook the fact that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have the same dogmatic source, the faith of Abraham. Bryan S. Turner confirms: The fundamental issue is that Islam, Christianity and Judaism are variations of a generic religion (of Abraham), but they have been differentiated in order for the West to be categorically distinguished from the East. In historical and cultural terms, the Abrahamic faiths cannot be neatly and definitely assigned to specific geographical locations and destinations, but for political reasons such a designation has to take place. (1) 18

The fact that East was and is not all Muslim as much as West was and is not all Christian seems to be a potion not easily swallowed by some Western and some Eastern critics and readers, when history has proven otherwise. Nabil Matar, writes: In 1600, George Manwaring confirmed that ‗There doth inhabit amongst the many Christians,‘ … In Smyrna in the second half of the seventeenth century, there were mosques, synagogues, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, along with Protestant chapels—demonstrating a religious tolerance that was unparallel in the cities of western Christendom. Even today, after four hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Eastern Mediterranean, many parts of the former Empire (particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean) [Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt], have maintained a sizeable minorities of Christians. … Renaissance travelers in the Levant confirmed this toleration and reported the amiable interaction

In the introduction of this work, Turner skillfully and convincingly discusses the outline of a theory of Orientalism. He starts by relating Orientalism to otherness, and then he exposes the principle elements of Oriental paradigm and the critical debate with Edward Said, to end by explaining traditional and Modern Orientalism. See Vol. I, 1–31. 18

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History also tells us that as early as 1581, correspondence between the Ottoman Sultan, Murad III, and Queen Elizabeth of England centered not on religious issues but on commercial issues (Matar, 21), and in the years to follow ―and as a result of tensions with Spain and the subsequent decline of trade with Germany, English ships ventured into the Mediterranean to compete for Venetian and Turkish trade‖ (Matar, 34). By 1605, Henry Robinson asserts, that British trade with Islamic countries was vital because it resulted in ―a healthy balancing of imports and exports‖ (6). Along the same lines, Nabil Matar confirms that ―From the medieval period until the end of the eighteenth century, Britain, unlike, for instance Spain and Portugal, did not undertake a single colonial enterprise in the domain of Islam… Britain‘s imperialist thrust was directed westward not eastward‖ (13). Even 19th and 20th century Western imperialist encounters between the two worlds, which started with Napoleon‘s invasion of Egypt, were and still are prompted by economic interests—interests in controlling the trade routes to the Far East and, in more recent times, in controlling the Arab oil. Bryan S. Turner asserts that one of the purposes of his work is to show that ―the religious connections between Islam and Christianity are overshadowed by inter-regional conflicts over economic and political recourses‖ (1 and 2). And the fact is that conflicts between the East and the West were and still are politicoeconomic, and to some extent they were less ferocious than those among western countries or among Eastern countries themselves. For instance, the enmity among England, Spain, and France was as devastating as that which existed among Turkey and Greece and Turkey and the Arab world. Also one must not ignore the fact that tensions and even bloody encounters among Christian sects themselves were at times more ferocious than the politically motivated encounters between Western forces and Eastern ones. It is wrong, then, to assume that all encounters between the East and the West were cultural and/or religious. Also, it is high time to tell the truth, as Byron always sought to do, that economic invasions take different masks, mostly religious and cultural, and that the god of materialism and money, and not the Divine God, occupied and still oc-

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cupies man‘s immediate concerns and governs world affairs; this god is behind all fatal and futile encounters. And it seems to me that current tragic world events, the September 11 events, when Islamic fundamentalists, who represented none but the forces of evil, were wrongly media-fixed as representing Islam and the Muslims, who themselves denounced the acts of and even fought against those fundamental groups in their own countries, only prove that the West still lacks a genuine knowledge of Eastern cultures, and especially, of Islam. Such media-fixing is propagandist; it creates a kind of ―Islamophobia,‖ to use Said‘s word, in the West, and it seems to reinforce Samuel Huntington‘s claim that the current ―central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics would be conflict between groups from different civilizations‖ (13). It must be known, however, that the reduction of all relations between the West and the East to cultural and religious clashes brings in more clashes, at a time when it is becoming more and more obvious that peoples of different religions and cultures can live and integrate in common communities—the best example is the United States of America, whose communities comprise a microcosm of world religions and cultures. Even after the September 11 tragic events, more than twelve million Muslims live peacefully as United States citizens, which is almost the same number of Christians, who currently live peacefully in the Arab world. We all know that Byron abhorred propagandists; consequently, he would not endorse false accusations, as he was fully knowledgeable about Islam and the Muslims. Byron died fighting against the oppression of the Turks and not the Muslims. Let us not forget that in his correspondence, Byron‘s pronouncements on Christianity and the Christians, though a bit harsher than his pronouncements on Islam and the Muslims, are indicative of his impartiality to all religions. For instance, in two letters addressed to Francis Hodgson in 1811, Byron summarizes some of his religious convictions, which later became part of the backbone of master works like Manfred, Cain: A Mystery, and Heaven and Earth; he writes: As to revealed religion, Christ came to save man; but a good Pagan will go to heaven, and a bad Nazarene to hell; … I am no Platonist, I am nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian,

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other. Talk of Galileeism? Show me the effects—are you better, wiser, kinder by your percepts? I will bring you ten Mussulmans shall shame you in all good-will towards men, prayer to God, and duty to their neighbours. (BLJ, II, 86)

Ten days later, Byron writes: As to miracles, I agree with Hume that it is more probable men should lie or be deceived, than that things out of the course of nature should so happen. Mahomet wrought miracles, Brothers of the prophet had proselytes, and so would Breslau the conjurer, had he lived in the time of Tiberius. Besides, I trust that God is not of a Jew, but the God of all mankind; and, as you allow that a virtuous Gentile may be saved, you do away the necessity of being a Jew or a Christian. (BLJ, II, 97–98).

Byron was brave enough to declare that ―God is not of a Jew, but the God of all mankind,‖ Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc. He was intolerant to the religion of hatred, greed, cant, and hypocrisy, itself the cause of man‘s fatal and futile encounters with other men. Byron‘s impartiality to religion is further evident in The Giaour because he neither sides with Hassan nor with Giaour. And if the Muslim Fisherman sides with Hassan, he does because of his loyalty to his community‘s primitive traditions. Besides, no one character, Westerner or Easterner, speaks the voice of Byron for, from the beginning of the tale, it seems quite clear that Byron‘s mouthpiece is the ―Fair clime! where every season smiles‖; this setting witnesses the brutality, cruelty, and futility of man‘s vengeful and futile actions. The paradox, which Byron establishes, is between the purity of nature and cruelty of man; this paradox seems to be at the heart of the tale‘s theme. In light of what have been said above, Byron‘s The Giaour, like Delacroix‘s Le Combat du Giaour et du Pacha, reveals nothing more than the futile encounter between two losers, Giaour and Hassan, for one loses his beloved and his own life, and the other dies slowly as he grieves over his loss and lives in torture. Here, I would like to note that it is only natural that the tale‘s plot may imply to Saidists and to Western and Eastern surface readers that the encounter in the tale is between the Christian West and the Muslim East. How-

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ever, I would like to suggest that, in The Giaour, Byron‘s main purpose was far more farsighted than exposing the superiority of one culture over the other, for he goes beyond the then current conceptions of global affairs to show that all man-made encounters are fatal and futile. The tales also expose Byron‘s dissatisfaction with all cultural and even religious practices of man. Daniel Watkins suggests that the Eastern tales ―describe the pervasive cultural, attitudes, practices, and beliefs which, under certain circumstances, not only limit human independence, but in fact support reactionary and morally destitute social systems‖ (16). To Byron, man‘s basic human passions and feelings (selfishness, deceit, love and hate, etc.) and his basic barbaric practices (revenge and murder) are not only similar but have little to do with religion or geography. In Don Juan, Byron confirms that man‘s ―hatred is by far the longest pleasure‖ (CPW, V, Canto XIII, Stz. vi). In his correspondence he asserts that mankind is ―selfish & distrustful, I except none.—The cause of this is the state of Society, in the World everyone is to steer for himself, it is useless, perhaps selfish to expect anything from his neighbour‖; ―We are all selfish, nature did that for us‖ (BLJ, II, 150 and 170). Thus, it is likely that what Byron wanted to say in The Giaour is that no culture can ―go alone,‖ and that world cultures are different only on the surface while at their core they are alike because they hold the same human experiences, thoughts, feelings, and passions. The Romantics believed that no culture can be completely independent and self-generic. ―‗The Great Family of Man,‘ an American photography exhibition (503 photos from 68 different countries), in its French press coverage at least, aims to prove that by scratching the superficial diversity of skins and institutions one rapidly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature‖ (Knight, 617). Giaour‘s contempt to Hassan is as vigorous and human as Hassan‘s contempt of Giaour. Their revengeful nature is only human. Their love to Leila is all the same in its human destructive power, and their moral attitude towards Leila is all the same in its patriarchal primitiveness. Hassan acts according to ―the mores of his civilization,‖ Caroline Frankline confirms, and the Venetian Giaour, according to ―the basic ideological assumptions of primitive patriarchy‖ (42 and 47). They both sin against man and God, and they are both punished severely for their futile actions. In this respect, if they represent different cultures, neither of their cultures

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is better or worse than the other one. Besides, their religions are monotheistic; they are essentially alike in their call for love, compassion, and forgiveness, and their God or Allah is, as Byron asserts, the same God. Thus, in The Giaour, Byron exposes the destructive practices of people belonging to the East and the West. The death of the Eastern Muslim heroes, Leila and Hassan, and the feelings of guilt and repentance of the apparently Christian Giaour are indications of the futility of such practices and encounters. And it seems that the greatest tragedy for both Giaour and Hassan lies in their awareness of the futility of their encounter and in their overlooking of the fact that their victory is concurrent with the destruction of each other. Justified by their social and political disillusionments and their sense of right to defend their own interests, Giaour and Hassan combat each other, and in the process they commit the most horrible of crimes against the other and, consequently, against themselves. More horrible than this is their illusion that their salvation lies in destroying rather than forgiving their enemies although they are both aware that their actions are religiously unjustified. They both violate their confessional teachings only for the sake of their limited personal urges, and they both overlook the Christian principle, ―Love your enemies,‖ and the Muslim verse, ―And verily whoso is patient and forgiveth—lo! That, verily, is (of) steadfast heart of things‖ (XLII: 43). However, it seems that encounters are in most cases enthused by acts of individual fanatical revenges, which, according to Spinoza, narrow man‘s life and render it devoid of every kind of wisdom, since encounter and revenge are faithless acts, which allow man to be the judge in his own case against his fellow man (Russell, 561). Discussing Ernest Dowson‘s esthetic of futility, John Reed writes, ―That Ernest Dowson could site Schopenhauer when describing the sexual urge as ‗the Evil Will which baits its trap with the illusion Love and scatters the illusion to the winds when its purpose is fulfilled,‘ suggests that he was aware of and selfconscious about the futility of men‘s motivations‖ (94). I would like to suggest that Byron‘s Giaour and Hassan were aware that their urge for revenge is fruitless, baseless, and futile. Giaour‘s urge for revenge is only an indication of his ―Evil Will which baits its trap with the illusion Love,‖ for his passionate love to Leila generates his passionate hate to Hassan. Further, to Daniel Watkins,

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―The assassination of Hassan is much more than a simple act of revenge; it is a desperate act to destroy the obstacle that stands between Giaour and abstract virtue [Leila]. Even when the possibility of dominating Leila is removed by her death, Giaour cannot see the inadequacy of his thought and continues to deny the value of life‖ (45). Hassan drowns Leila to satisfy his ―Evil Will,‖ which is justified by his community‘s primitive practices. Had anyone of them really and truly loved Leila, he would have forgiven her and the other. and Hassan become the jury and the judges. Both become sinners when they let their passionate urges direct their actions. Then, they lose control of their wisdom. Here lies the futility of their actions, which are senseless, useless, pointless, vain, and ineffective. With the act of revenge all parties involved become losers, and all are bound to approach self-destruction as they become selfsubsistent. In this sense, ―The Giaour is no better and no worse than Hassan, … [and] in murdering Hassan he achieves the exact reverse of his professed goals‖ (Watkins, 45). When Hassan is slaughtered by Giaour, he falls on his back with —his unclosed eye Yet lowering on his enemy, As if the hour that seal‘d his fate Surviving left his quenchless hate; And o‘ver him bends that foe with brow As dark as his that bled bellow—. (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 669–674)

Hassan calls for Allah, but in vain: 'Yes, Leila sleeps beneath the wave, But his shall be a redder grave; Her spirit pointed well the steel Which taught that felon heart to feel. He call'd the Prophet, but his power Was vain against the vengeful Giaour: He call'd on Alla—but the word Arose unheeded or unheard.‘ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 675–682)

Hassan‘s prayer is ―unheeded or unheard‖ by Allah because he has violated Allah‘s teachings, and his punishment is hell, ―a redder grave.‖ As a Christian, Giaour violates the teachings of the

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Bible when he slays Hassan. Thus, none is devoted to his religion and, as a result, cannot be considered as representative of his creed. ―The action engaged in by both Hassan and Giaour—their hand-to-hand combat—is causeless, despite the violent effort of each man to determine himself as a cause,‖ says Jerome Christensen, who goes on saying that ―Victory over the Oriental foe can never be complete. The severance of the hand, of instrument from cause, assures that despite Giaour‘s professions of finality (the claim to be a cause, the wish to die), act will be followed by reaction according to the inexorable mechanism of revenge‖ (108 and 109). This is proven in the confession of Giaour, who exposes his turbulent pain, which exceeds even that of Hassan‘s when he says: I gazed upon him where he lay, And watched his spirit ebb away; Though pierced like Pard by hunter‘s steel, He felt not half that now I feel. (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 1085–1088)

Indeed, revenge dissociates Giaour and forces him to feel pain, but not necessarily shame, the reason why in his desperation he neither regrets his action nor seeks redemption and salvation. In his struggle against his past anxieties, ―The past and present are brought face to face and the past is renounced‖ (39).19 He maintains his loneliness because he is convinced that his past action is futile and irrevocable. This indescribable feeling of pain is not a feeling of a winner. With the slaying of Hassan and the loss of Leila, Giaour lives his eternal loneliness, ―‗My wrath is wreak'd, the deed is done,/And now I go—but go alone'‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 687–688). Giaour‘s loneliness is the punishment he inflicts on himself for six years during which he stays among the monks, and until the end of his life, he refuses to kneel, he shuns the holy shrine, he refuses to take the holly sacrament, and he mocks at misery ―As if Bertram R. Forer in his ―Therapeutic Relationships in Groups,‖ in Encounter: The Theory and Practice, ed. by Arthur Burton (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 1970): 27-41, discusses man‘s dissociation from himself and the world when he encounters his expectations of the past and present. 19

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his sorrow or disdain/Forbade him e‘er to smile again‖ (The Giaour, ll. 855–856). He is quite aware of his guilt, pain, and loneliness; he is not willing to seek relief through repentance. All he can see and feel in his cell are the ―dreary void,‖ and ―The leafless desert of the mind—/The waste of feelings unemploy'd—‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 958–60). Giaour‘s eyes, mind, and feelings are senseless, useless, pointless, vain, and ineffective. He lives at the core of futility, which is nowhere more obvious than in his confession: Waste not thine orison—despair Is mightier than thy pious prayer; I would not, if I might, be blest, I want no paradise—but rest. (CPW, III, The Giaour, ll. 1267–1270).

Giaour‘s ―contrasting the peace in the monk‘s life with his own tortured existence, makes it apparent that he simply wishes to break his solitude by sharing his secret rather than to seek forgiveness,‖ … ―His [the Giaour‘s] moral position is at once universal in its application but relativistic in its assumption, for he would have done as Hassan did had Leila been false to him as well: ‗Faithless to him [Hassan]—he gave the blow;/But true to me—I laid him low‘‖ (Marshall, 505). This renders Giaour‘s and Hassan‘s moral codes similarly fatal and in retrospect futile, for what is fatal is also futile. Some other critics even reduce the relation to an encounter between the masculine Christian West and the feminine Muslim East. Thus, Islam is associated with the desirous houri, the odalisque, the harem, the Eastern bath, and the Islamic paradise Al-Janat, while Christianity is linked with masculinity and power. In light of this, The Giaour and other Oriental tales by Byron have been discussed as expressions of encounters between the Christian masculine world and the Muslim feminine world; after all Leila, Zuleika, and Gulnare are Muslim beauties, houries, while Giaour, Conrad, and Alp are Christian heroes. Christensen confirms that ―The Giaour prefigures Edward Said‘s magisterial critique of Orientalist discourse: it represents the postulated difference between the Westerner and the Oriental as phantasmal (as phantasmal as is the difference between female and male)‖ (108). Eric Meyer reports that the feminization of the East started with Napoleon‘s interest in a sixteen-year-old daughter of an Egyp-

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tian sheik. When the girl was left by Napoleon, she was killed. ―The incident of the death of Napoleon‘s harem girl,‖ Meyer believes, thus serves to initiate an inquiry into the workings of Romantic Orientalism as a site of cultural contestation in which the violent conflict for ideological hegemony over political terrain is figured in the struggles of men to assert power over Eastern women, who embody the mirage of the Orient in its most ambiguously sexual and political charged form. (659)

Meyer goes as far in his fancy as to confirm that Beckford and Byron had a desire ―to assert authorial hegemony over the feminized East [to] bring it under the regulation of the masculine West‖ (660). Giaour is considered by Meyer as a representative of the Western liberator of Eastern women, while Hassan is considered as the Oriental oppressor (663). This I cannot digest for several reasons. First, how can an oppressor be a liberator? Second, if indeed Byron had a desire to assert ―authorial hegemony over the feminized East,‖ then why does Giaour lose Leila? The tale exposes the authorial hegemony of Hassan and Giaour over the Eastern female; they both lose. Also, Byron‘s authorial hegemony over Western women, whom he disposed, was one of the main reasons for his leaving England twice in his life. And finally, how can a religion be masculinized or feminized? And supposing that religions can be feminized and masculinized, Christianity holds more feminine attributes than Islam because of the great devotion given by most Christians churches to the female Christian Saints, especially to the Virgin Mary, who in Islam is also honored in Surat Mariam or ―The Chapter on Mary.‖ Besides, according to Nietzsche, Islam is ―a strong heroic or manly religion in contrast to Christianity,‖ which he considers as rather weak (Turner, 1 and 7). Still, I strongly believe that religions cannot and must not be classified under gender. The dialectic, which seems to affect the misconception of the tale, lies in the wrongly assumed imperialistic implications of the tale. The winning/losing exegesis, which lies in the heart of traditional dialectic of imperialist anti-cultural and anti-religious literature, does not apply to Byron‘s tale. The assumption that Byron‘s The Giaour and Delacroix‘s Le Combat du Giaour et du Pacha imply the winning of the apparently Christian Giaour over the Muslim Hassan may boost the sense of Western superiority and Eastern inferiority. It is common knowledge that Byron was never an imperia-

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listic writer. All throughout his life, he was against oppression and for the oppressed whichever their cultures or religions were. The reader of Byron‘s The Giaour, especially the modern reader, must not be baited by the above winning/losing dialectic and by the stereotyping of the East and the West by some literary critics. This dialectic is cause enough for invigorating new conflicts and encounters among cultures. The term, ―encounter,‖ confirms a conflict and a struggle between two orders, which cannot meet on common grounds; thus, the consequence of encounter is either winning or losing. Had the relation between Christianity and Islam been an encounter, one of them would have overridden or diffused the other. The misinterpretation of Oriental works painted or written by western artists and literary figures still looms at the dawn of the third millennium, when digital media and cyberspace have made available to scholars and students of art and literature all over the world an enormous store of information related to world cultures. Moreover, I cannot but show my bewilderment at the misrepresentation of world cultures in art and literature. The propagandist media has already done enough damage; the relation between the East and West will get worse unless we, scholars and researchers, start studying and exposing other cultures objectively and impartially. The need to correct misconceptions and misinterpretations, when reading Byron‘s Oriental works, seems now more pressing than ever before, especially that these misinterpretations hinder the forces of the inevitable drive toward global peace, which is only possible when tensions between world orders are diffused and when Truth prevails amongst the peoples of the world. ―I have found it makes no difference what culture you follow, what your background is, what your experiences are, what language you speak, what accent you have; the communality of human bonds far transcends the superficial differences,‖ says Sajjid Zahir Chinoy, a student from India, during the Commencement Ceremony of Richmond University, in 1996; he goes on saying, ―The world has fought hard to highlight its difference. We have forgotten our inherent similarities. Why? All because what was missing was a little understanding, just a little sensitivity, just a little openmindedness, just a little empathy‖ (Qtd. Lucas, Appendix A2–A4). These words, which I am quite certain Byron would have fully endorsed, should set the course of how we, scholars and researchers,

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should perceive other cultures. Indeed, if we read Byron‘s The Giaour, with the above words in the back of our minds, we can easily understand his anger at man‘s futile actions and passions. And if Byron proposes the superiority of anything, it is the superiority of Truth.

BYRON’S EASTERN LITERARY PORTRAITS Nowhere is Orientalism better used for its own sake and/or for presenting authentic literary portraits of the Eastern world and its peoples than in the Oriental works of Lord Byron, who was exceptional in his genuine interest in the Eastern matter and for his wide knowledge of it. His extensive reading in various books about the East opened his inquisitive childhood mind to an exotic world and provided his lonely youth with daydream delight: ―To the East he had looked, with the eyes of romance, from his very childhood,‖ says Count Gamba (Qtd. Moore, 119). Before he had finished his college education, he had eagerly read every book about the East he could find.20 However, Byron‘s confidence in the authenticity of the books he read turned into a cynical doubt. At the age of twenty, he declared that ―it is from experience not Books, we ought to judge of mankind. —There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own reason‖ (BLJ, I, 173). And in 1809, Byron‘s dream of visiting the East came true when he left England for a two-year ―Pilgrimage‖ seeking a genuine understanding of the peoples and cultures of that ancient part of the world. In the East, Byron‘s interest developed into a deep passion which accompanied him all his life. His ―mobilite‖—―his own natural tendency to yield thus to every chance impression, and change with every passing impulse‖ (Moore, 646), his ability to turn with ease from one extreme to another, and his adaptability to different conditions and situations made him more than a mere observer of the East. He lived with the Easterners, studied their languages and 20 The books Byron mentions in his letters, journals, and notes and the ones listed in the 1816 sale catalog of Byron‘s library number 77, including 27 travel works, 23 literary ones and 27 histories.

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caught the spirit and local color of their culture; he stayed long enough to assimilate himself into the culture and to become a participant. Yes, indeed, a participant gifted with an observant eye and an inquisitive mind and highly sensitive to the rhythms of life in a foreign culture. ―I live not in myself, but I become/Portion of that around me,‖ (CPW, II, Childe, III, Stz. 72, ll. 680–681) he spoke through Childe Harold. And unlike those who actually toured the East and employed most of their time in recording their observations of its antiquities and archaeology, Byron spent his time living, enjoying, and studying contemporary Eastern life and cultures. But first the standards against which an Eastern portrait may be judged as authentic or not must be set. The Eastern ingredients, including the characters, scenes of action, customs, costumes and phraseology, found in genuine literary portraits are employed to enhance the local colors of Eastern life and cultures while the Eastern elements in the inauthentic works are present for merely decorative effect and/or for propaganda purposes. It is easy for a Western writer to make references to these ingredients and to describe Eastern characters, their settings, customs and costumes— Hobhouse, Byron‘s traveling companion had done this in his Journey. But it is indeed difficult for a Western writer to put Eastern life into his characters, to make them think, speak, and act like Easterners would; yet, Byron, who enjoyed dealing with difficult tasks, painted with his pen genuine Eastern portraits which would make an Eastern reader of his Oriental tales wonder whether those were originally written in Eastern languages or not. The fact that Byron emphasized first-hand experience as the main source of his Eastern literary portraits is evident in his letters and notes. In the ―Advertisement‖ of The Giaour, Byron claims: ―The tale which these disjointed fragments presents, is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East than formerly‖ (CPW, III, 39). And it seems it was written by an observant traveler who had experienced the Eastern bright skies, and participated in Eastern life. In a letter to John Galt, Byron explains that the first part of The Bride of Abydos ―was drawn from observations of mine‖ (BLJ, III, 196 and 199). A month earlier he had written to Lord Holland: ―it [the Bride] is my story and my East‖ (BLJ, III, 168). McGann notes that ―what B[yron] knew from personal experience was the Eastern culture which lent verisimilitude to the plot of Bride, a

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number of specific incidents and scenes, and much local colouring‖ (CPW, III, 435). This fact suggests another significant Eastern source never mentioned before by any scholar, The Mu’allaqat [―the seven long or suspended poems‖], and, especially, the Mu’allaqua of Antara bin Shaddad, which Byron had read in Jones‘s works and heard in the coffee-houses where storytellers recited it. The similarities between Byron‘s tale and the Arabic one are striking. Antara and his cousin Abla, like Selim and Zulieka, grew up together and loved each other. According to the custom Antara had the first right to marry Abla; however, his fierce uncle, an image of Selim‘s uncle, rejected the proposal of Antara who was the son of a slave mother: Selim‘s mother too was a slave. Furthermore, like Selim, Antara had the traditional Eastern mixture of love and valor, and he also died in a fight.21 The Corsair, Byron says, ―was written con amore, and much from existence‖ (BLJ, III, 243). And the source of the last of the tales, The Siege of Corinth, is clarified by Byron who, in the ―Advertisement‖, alludes to a historical event of 1715, when the Turks, under the Grand Vizier, besieged Corinth to clear their way to the Morea. What has been said about the sources of the Eastern tales is ample proof that the East is indeed the actual source of Byron‘s literary portraits. However, because of the limited scope of this section, I have limited my discussion to representative ones. The first of his Eastern female portraits is Leila, the heroine of The Giaour. In Arabic and Persian the name, ―Leila,‖ stands for ―khmr‖ [―wine‖] and ―zulmah‖ [―darkness‖]. Leila is also the name of the Eastern Juliet-like figure celebrated in Eastern poetry. Byron was certainly aware of the name‘s meaning and literary associations because, in the tale, Leila‘s love substitutes for the wine Hassan does not taste and her sin is the black spot which he must wash away.

The ―Mu‘allaqa of Antara bin Shaddad‖ is discussed and translated by A. J. Arberry in The Seven Odes (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957): 149–84; and by Reynold A. Nicholson in A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962): 114–16. 21

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No evidence exists that Leila is an image of an actual Eastern woman whom Byron knew. Although he was personally involved in an event similar to that recounted in The Giaour, Byron never suggested that the Turkish girl he saved was his model for Leila. Whether she is or not is insignificant because Leila‘s character was an actual representation of most Eastern females of the time. Besides, Byron frequently indicated that his poetic expression was based on actual experience; thus, it is wrong to consider Leila a mere fictitious Eastern character. Another indication of Leila‘s Eastern person is her overwhelming beauty. Lady Mary Montagu, whose letters Byron read with eagerness, exalted the beauty of Eastern females in her correspondences; she says after being admitted to a Turkish bath in Sofia: There were many amongst them as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titan, and most of their skins shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or ribbon, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces.‖ (59)

Again struck by Oriental beauty, especially that of Fatima, the daughter of her Turkish hostess, Lady Montagu confirms that Eastern grace and beauty surpass those of the finest sculptures she had ever seen (86–91). Lord Byron‘s descriptions of the female Eastern characters of his Oriental tales are typical, especially that of Leila. Extolling Leila‘s beauty, Byron writes: Her eye‘s dark charm ‗twere vain to tell, But gaze on that of the Gazelle, On her fair cheek‘s unfading hue The young pomegranate‘s blossom strew Their bloom in blushes ever new — (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 473–474; 494–496)

Through these exotic Eastern images Leila‘s portrait becomes an ideal of Eastern beauty. In fact, on one occasion Byron said: ―My writings, indeed, tend to exalt the sex; and my imagination has always delighted in giving them a beau ideal likeness, but I only drew them as a painter or a statuary would‖ (Qtd. Wiener, 157). In

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other words, Byron colors and frames fact with imagination to make it exciting and interesting. Thus, Leila‘s beauty might be exaggerated, but it has some basis in fact. An important aspect of Leila‘s portrait which renders her Eastern is her passive nature. Throughout the tale, Leila is neither heard nor seen in action. As a Turkish, Muslim woman, she has been trained since childhood to obey and acquiesce rather than to act and choose. She has lived her life as a passive figure secluded from the world around her. When she tries to choose and to become active, when she chooses her own lover, her society condemns her. Byron‘s second portrait of the Eastern female character is his Bride of Abydos’s Zuleika. In a letter to John Murray, Byron wrote: ―Zuleika is the Persian poetical name for Potipher‘s wife on whom and Joseph there is a long poem —in the Persian‖ (BLJ, III, 164). Byron‘s observation is correct. In Eastern literature the story of ―Zulaykha and Yusuf‖ was celebrated by several poets. Among the Persian poets, Jami (1414–1492), a mythic poet, wrote a long poem celebrating this tale. Byron must have read this tale in Jones‘s translations of Persian poetry. The elements that bind Byron‘s poem to the Persian tale are the name Zuleika, the ideal beauty of both heroines, and their passionate love. However, the plots and circumstances of each tale are completely different. On the authenticity of Zuleika‘s portrait Byron wrote: ―I have a living character in my eye for Zuleika—‖ (BLJ, III, 195). Marchand believes that ―the model for Zuleika was perhaps a composite of his feelings for Augusta [Byron‘s sister] and Lady Francis Webster‖ (BLJ, III, 195). If such is the case, then Zuleika must be a Western character with an Eastern name. But this is not the case. Zuleika, Like Byron‘s Leila, possesses a passive nature. After Giaffir informs her of his intention to wed her to Bey Oglu in order to profit from a political bargain, Zuleika ―In silence bowed‖ as a sign of obedience (CPW, III, Bride , I. l. 219). Later when she receives Selim in her chamber, following the manner of Eastern lovers, she sprinkles the Persian perfume in her chamber,22 gives Selim a 22 Byron must have read a poem by Firdausi who says: ―...She sprinkled there/Camphor and shed the rose-water.‖ See Reynold A. Nichol-

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―Rose‖ as a sign of her love, and throws herself at his feet (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 270–86). In fact, the rose is amongst the mostly celebrated plants in Eastern poetry and is believed to embody the spirit of love. Besides, like most Muslim Eastern females, Zuleika has lived all her youth in seclusion from the world around her; her supposed brother is the only man she truly knows. Selim encourages her because he is aware that she is not his half-sister but his cousin. When she learns that Selim is not her brother, her first reaction is to beg him to take her as a slave (CPW, III, Bride, II, l. 183). This fact reveals her genuine suppressed Eastern nature. Zuleika is, as Wiener believes, ―a puppet in the hands of Giaffir and Selim‖ (Wiener, 185). But she is only so because she has been trained to be a puppet. Like Leila, Zuleika ceases to be when she tries to act. Unlike Leila and Zuleika, Gulnare represents the inhibited Eastern woman who revolts against the Eastern norms and follows her heart. The Persian word ―julnar‖ is the plural noun that refers to pomegranate flowers. In The Corsair, Gulnare is truly a beautiful Eastern flower, but a flower with thorns that hurt. She falls in love with Conrad and kills her master to save her lover. Is Gulnare, then, an Eastern female figure or is she another image of Lady Macbeth? Gulnare‘s physiognomy, her thoughts, and actions indicate that she is truly Eastern. Her features are typical of beautiful Grecian women: That form, with eye so dark, and cheek so fair, And auburn waves of gemmed and braided hair; With shape of fairy lightness —naked foot, That shines like snow, and fall on earth as mute — (CPW, III, Corsair, II, ll. 402–05)

She is ―The Haram queen23—but still the slave of Seyd!‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, II, l. 224). In other words, she is Pacha‘s favorite son, Translations of Eastern Poetry and Prose New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1969): 86. 23 In his Journey Hobhouse says: ―The powerful females of the harem have been allowed to possess in a superior degree a virtue which is of itself the characteristic of a noble and ingenious mind.‖ A Journey through

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captive. She falls in love with a captive, like herself, and envies him for his love of Medora: ―But yet—thou lov‘st—and—Oh! I envy those/Whose hearts on hearts as faithfully can repose‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, II, ll. 493–94). She has the right to envy Conrad because she has never loved truly before: ―My love stern Seyd‘s Oh—No—No—not my love— I felt—I feel—love dwell with—with the free. I am a slave, a favoured slave at best,‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, II, l. 499; ll. 502–03)

By seeking freedom, Gulnare represents a living portrait of Greece itself. A slave is possessed, not loved; she would only love when she is free. Gulnare breaks Conrad‘s prison chains to break her own. Although her name has a Persian origin, among Byron‘s Eastern female characters she is the most lively, Grecian portrait. Another Grecian female portrait is Medora. Her ―deep-blue eye‖ reflects the ―dark-blue‖ seas of Greece; ―her long dark lashes,‖ and ―her long fair hair‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 468, 420; III, l. 609) place her among the fairies of Greece; she is a sample of Don Juan‘s Haidèe. Medora can sing, dance, tell tales of fair Olympia, and play the guitar (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 436–40). She also picks fruits from the fields, prepares meals for feasts, and, most of all, she loves faithfully. When Conrad‘s sails appear on the horizon, like any devoted Christian, she blesses the mast and calls on God (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 385–87). Medora‘s heart is filled with love and devotion: ―There, in its [Medora‘s heart] centre, a sepulchral lamp/Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 351–52). And waiting hopelessly for Conrad‘s return, she dies of a broken heart. In many ways, Hobhouse‘s description of Grecian women applies to Byron‘s heroine. They do not neglect ―the care of their charms‖; they all are ―able to embroider very tastefully, and can generally play on the Greek lute, or rebeck‖; they learn their dancing from each other; and ―they carry their devotion to the highest pitch of enthusiasm‖ (Hobhouse, I, 405–413). Me-

Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople, during the Years 1809 and 1810 (London, 1813): II, p.256.

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dora has all these characteristics; she is an authentic image of a Grecian woman. In Greece, Byron lived with the Macri family, a widow and her three beautiful daughters, who not only entertained their guest but served him as well. This, however, should not imply that Medora is one of these Grecian ―divines,‖ as Byron calls them; it simply signifies that Byron had observed Grecian women closely. Like his Eastern female portraits, Byron‘s Eastern male characters have Eastern blood in their veins, and they fall under two categories: the rebels and the oppressors. In a note to The Giaour, E. H. Coleridge tries to explain the word ―Giaour‖ as follows: If it is associated with the Arabic jawr, a ―deviating‖ or ―erring,‖ the initial consonant would be soft, but if with the Persian gawr, or guebre, ―a fire-worshipper,‖ the word should be pronounced Gow-er —as Gower Street has come to be pronounced. (Coleridge, III, 95)

In fact ―Giaour‖ is the Turkish word ―giaur‖ which derives from the Persian and Arabic terms Coleridge mentions, but it is pronounced as ―jawr‖ as in ―owl.‖ The Turks used this term to refer to infidels and to Christians. In Arabic and Persian, ―Giaour‖ has several meanings besides the ones Coleridge offers —for example, ―injustice,‖ ―violence,‖ ―iniquity,‖ ―oppression,‖ and ―tyranny‖—and it is pronounced as the Turkish term (Steingass, 377). Thus, when the Fisherman calls the murderer of Hassan, Giaour, he merely refers to him as the infidel. Giaour‘s real name is not revealed by the poet; had he revealed it, it would have certainly been a Grecian name. The fact that this rebel is a Christian does not render him a Western character as some might think. We must always remember that the birth-place of Christianity is the East and that the long domination of the Ottoman Empire over most of the Eastern world did not convert the Christians of some Eastern countries, especially those of Greece and Lebanon and parts of Syria and Palestine. Furthermore, he looks and talks like an Easterner. He has dark hair and a pale brow, and he describes Leila as ―a form of life and light—‖ and as his ―life‘s unerring light—‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 894–95; ll. 112. 1145). It is the custom of Eastern lovers to associate their loved ones with bright colors and light. For instance,

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Firdausi, whose works Byron read, says to his lover: ―Come to me with a lover‘s gait/And fill with light my soul and eyes!‖ (Trans, Nicholson, 85) On the other hand, Hassan, the rival to Giaour, is a typical Turkish portrait. The Arabic name derives from an adjective ―hassan‖ [―fair‖]. In The Giaour Hassan obeys the Eastern creed. He drowns his wife not because he wants to but because to do so is to be a ―true Osmanlie‖ [―Turk‖]. Otherwise, he becomes an outsider among his own people. Hassan bears all the physical marks of a true Turk. His skin is dark and he wears a beard which he curls when he hears the shots of Giaour and his men [a Turkish custom indicating one‘s alertness and deep thinking] (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 589–93). His frown and his voice are ―dreaded more than hostile sword,‖ an indication of his stern personality (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 599–600). Wearing his turban and ―his garb of green,‖ he looks like an Eastern Emir [―Prince‖] (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 35–57). Hassan‘s Eastern manners are implied in the words of the Fisherman who, describing Hassan‘s desolate hall, says: His roof —that refuge unto men — Is Desolation‘s hungry den, — The guest flies the hall, and the vassal from labour, Since his turban was cleft by the infidel‘s sabre! (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 348–51)

Thus, Hassan has adhered to the Eastern law of hospitality before he is killed by Giaour. Hassan also believes in the Eastern superstition of the evil eye which he sees in Giaour (CPW, III, Giaour, l. 612). Moreover, he dies like a faithful Muslim who calls on the Prophet and Allah (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 679–82). Thus, Hassan‘s behavior is consistent with strict Islamic law. His enslavement of Leila is also consistent with his commitment to tradition over passion. Selim, on the other hand, is a revolutionary Eastern figure who revolts against his master Giaffir. Byron softens the Arabic name ―Salim‖ [―sound‖ and ―safe‖] into the Turkish ―Selim.‖ In The Bride of Abydos, Selim‘s abilities and manhood are underestimated by Giaffir, but in the second canto Selim turns out to be a sound and brave leader of a ―lawless brood.‖

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Byron provides little physical description except to stress that Giaffir ridicules Selim‘s short beard. His personality, however, appears to have both Turkish and Grecian characteristics. As a Turk he reveres and obeys his supposed father, ―For son of Muslim must expire/Ere dare to sit24 before his sire!‖ (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 51–52). As a Muslim he swears by the ―Prophet‘s shrine‖ and calls on Mohammed (CPW, III, Bride, II, ll. 187, 325); like any cultured Easterner he is aware of ―Mejnoun‘s tale, or Sadi‘s song‖ (CPW, III, Bride, I, l. 72). On the other hand, as ―son of a slave‖— probably a Christian Greek—he has the soul of a Grecian, and he has strayed from the faith of Islam by drinking wine (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 87, 362; 317–20). As a renegade, he has vowed to fight against his own people (CPW, III, Bride, II, ll. 358–59). Selim, then, is simultaneously an insider and an outsider at the same time. Better, Selim is an Easterner trapped between two Eastern world traditions and confessions, the Turkish and the Grecian. Selim‘s master, Giaffir, is a typical portrait of the Turkish rulers. The name ―Ja‘far‖ in Persian refers to a little stream or a river. Byron had a Persian dictionary at hand and was most likely aware of the name‘s meaning. In the Bride of Abydos, Giaffir is the main stream which pushes the action forward. Nothing could have happened in the tale had he not decided to wed Zuleika to his opponent in order to cement his alliance. However, this stream is a stream of death and destruction, much like the stream of the Ottoman rule ravaging the Eastern world; in the Bride, it causes the destruction of both Selim and Zuleika. In a note to his tale, Byron indicates that a ―Giaffir Pacha of Arguyro Castro, or Scurtari, I am not sure which, was actually taken off by the Albanian Ali, in the manner described in the text‖ (CPW, III, III, 440–441). Ali then married the daughter of his victim and wed his two sons, Mouctar and Veli, with the daughters of Ibra24 In this verse line, Byron uses the verb ―to sit‖ in its Eastern implication of having a sitting with an exchange of opinions and ideas. In Turkey of the time, a son must not have a verbal interaction with his father; the son must listen and obey. All the reason why there is no doubt in my mind that Byron‘s awareness of the Turkish traditions and customs is authentic.

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him, Giaffir‘s successor and brother (Hobhouse, I, 106). In the Bride, Giaffir becomes the victor who, in his bid for power, poisons his brother Abdallah [―worshipper of God‖] and arranges the marriage of his daughter to Bey Ouglou [―Prince Ouglou‖]. Ali, then, must be the model for Giaffir. Although Giaffir‘s physiognomy is not described, we are told that he is old, that he has a face of a ―Mussluman,‖ that he is wise and skilled in hiding all but his pride, and that he is powerful, feared, and obeyed (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 24–25). Giaffir is also said to worship his daughter Zuleika and to hate his nephew Selim. Thus, he embodies power, wisdom, love, and hate. Being a Pacha, Giaffir needs not justify his actions to anyone, not even to his daughter: ―And how thou know‘st thy father‘s will — All that thy sex hath need to know — ‗Twas mine to teach obedience still, The way to love, thy lord may shew.‖ (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 215–18)

In fact, any Turkish father of the period could have said these same words since at the time women had no freedom of choice of future husbands. Thus, Giaffir talks both like a Pacha and like an Easterner; he is an image of not only Ali Pacha but of also most Eastern rulers or even fathers of the time. Another image of Ali Pacha is Conrad, whose Germanic name and ambiguous religious ties do not make him less Eastern than those who have Eastern names or belong to Islam. An Albanian or Grecian pirate, his appearance, thoughts, and actions indicate that he observes both Christian and Muslim customs. Conrad is described as having a ―common height,‖ ―dark eyebrow,‖ high and pale forehead, ―sun-burnt cheeks,‖ and a curly dark hair (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 196–204). Such features are characteristic of Easterners. Throughout the tale, the poet emphasizes Conrad‘s eye which is a keen eye, a ―searching eye,‖ and an ―upward eye‖ that has a ―cunning‘s gaze‖ and a ―stern glance.‖ His eyes reveal his personality: he is intelligent, cautious, proud, skillful, and brutal. Conrad is feared, obeyed, and envied because of his power of thought (CPW, III, Corsair, I, l. 182). Conrad‘s silence is frequently emphasized in the tale. He irritates his men, ―But they forgive his silence for success‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I, l. 66). They see

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in him a ―man of loneliness and mystery‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I. l. 673). However, the poet makes it clear that ―He, who would see, must be himself unseen‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I, l. 234). Conrad is also a man of power: ―Steer to that shore!‖ —they sail. ―Do this!‖ —‘tis done. ―Now form and follow me!‖ —the spoil is won. Thus prompt his accent and his actions still, And all obey and few enquire his will. (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 77–80)

He is also a man who loves: ―Yes, it was love— unchangeable—unchanged,/Felt but for one from whom he never ranged‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 286–87). Conrad has the triple eros of the East, the synthesis of wisdom, power, and love.25 In this respect, he is an image of Ali Pacha. Ali was a powerful outlaw; Conrad is a powerful pirate. Ali belonged to a dervish order; Conrad‘s silence is typical of dervishes, and he disguises himself as one. But unlike Ali, Conrad has a mixed background. Conrad‘s actions reveal that he is a mixture of both Christianity and Islam; he is a typical Albanian.26 Byron himself admired this mixture of the two religions in the Albanians (BLJ, I, 230). All of these facts support the suggestion that Conrad is an accurate portrait of a Byronic hero, but one who is an Eastern rebel. Among Byron‘s Eastern male portraits Seyd Pacha, the ruler in Corsair, is the most Oriental. The Turkish name ―Seyd‖ is the Hobhouse‘s description of Greeks in general applies in many cases to Byron‘s heroes and heroines: ―The islanders are darker, and of a stronger make than those on the main land. Their faces are just such as served for models to the ancient sculptors, ... Their eyes are large and dark, from which circumstance Mavromati, or Black-eyes, is a very common surname; their eye-brows are arched; their complexions are rather brown, but quite clear; and their cheeks and lips are tinged with a bright vermilion‖ (I, 404). 26 These people, says Hobhouse, are a mixture of Christians and Moslems; ―they go to the moscks on Fridays, and to the church on Sundays, saying, for their excuse, that they are sure of protection from the true Prophet; but which that is, they are not able to determine in this world‖ (I, 131). 25

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softened version of the Arabic title ―Sa‘yed‖ [―master‖]. In Byron‘s tale, Seyd is a Pacha and a master of his own province. The name, then, fits him very well. He is almost an archetype of Eastern rulers of the time. Furthermore, except for his traditional beard and fierce brow, Byron provides no description of Seyd‘s Eastern features. But he talks, thinks, and acts like an actual Eastern ruler. Confident of his expected victory over the pirates, Seyd has a feast prepared in order to please his bearded chiefs. Being a master whose rights exceed his people‘s rights, he quaffs ―forbidden draughts‖ while others drink ―berry‘s juice‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, II, ll, 31–32). He also communicates with his slaves and guards through signs rather than articulated words,27 and when he talks, he commands rather than asks and expects obedience: ―Stay, Dervise! I have more to question—stay,/I do command thee—sit—dost hear?—obey‖ (CPW, Corsair, II, ll. 99–100). He also thinks like an Eastern leader who honors the laws of hospitality for he knows their political significance: Why dost thou shun the salt? that sacred pledge, Which, once partaken, blunts the sabre‘s edge, Makes even contending tribes in peace unite, And hated hosts seem brethren to the sight! (CPW, III, Corsair, II, ll. 119–23)

When Seyd discovers the true identity of the disguised Conrad, he says: ―Accursed Dervise!—these thy tidings—thou/ Some villain spy—seize—cleave him—slay him now!‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, II, ll. 140–141). A Pacha does not need a court to sentence a victim to death; he is the jury and the judge. A final indicator of his Eastern nature is his reaction to seeing his galleys in flame. He begins tearing his beard as a sign of rage and frustration (CPW, III, Corsair, II. ll. 180-181). In Seyd, then, Byron presents an authentic image of an Eastern ruler. Finally, I must confirm that in addition to drawing his Eastern portraits from real situations, Byron paints them just as an Easterner who carries the Eastern cultural heritage in his blood and in the 27 John Cam Hobhouse discusses the Easterner‘s dependence on signs for communicating (I, p. 127).

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back of his mind. The life he puts in his literary portraits is a life lived by almost all Easterners. Byron‘s deep concern for authenticity originated from his natural fidelity to fact. Byron‘s own pronouncements supplement the above points. On one occasion, he said, ―I hate things all fiction‖ (BLJ, III, 202). On another, he told Thomas Moore, who did not visit the East yet wrote about it, ―The only advantage I have [―as to accuracy‖] is being on the spot‖ (BLJ, III, 194). Before John Murray published The Bride of Abydos, Byron wrote to him: Dear Sir—I send you a note for the ignorant—but I really wonder at finding you among them.—I don‘t care one lump of sugar for my poetry—but for my costume [i.e., ―to use an affected but expressive word‖]—and my correctness on those points . . . I will combat lustily.— (BLJ, III, 165).

Byron did ―combat lustily‖ to render his literary portraits highly authentic, and he succeeded because he used his interest in, his knowledge of, and his personal experiences in the East to achieve high art. His portraits were indeed so well painted that they inspired Delacroix to actually draw pictures representing Byron‘s Oriental literary portraits.

BYRON’S EASTERN BRIDE Commenting on the originality of The Bride of Abydos, Byron wrote in a note: ―As to originality, all pretensions are ludicrous; there is nothing new under the sun‖ (Qtd. Galt, 199). Byron emphasized actual experience as one of the sources of The Bride of Abydos when he wrote to John Galt that the first part of the Bride of Abydos ―was drawn from observations of mine‖ (BLJ, III, 169 and 199). A month earlier he had written to Lord Holland: ―It [the Bride of Abydos] is my story & my East‖ (BLJ, III, 168). Taking this note in its veritable sense, one may wonder how much of the East is actually in Byron‘s story. In his discussion of the main sources of The Bride of Abydos, Jerome McGann notes that ―what B[yron] knew from personal experience was the Eastern culture which lent verisimilitude to the plot of the Bride‖ (III, 435). McGann, however, does not point out to those elements of the Eastern culture. Bernard Blackstone acknowledges Byron‘s genuine concern and awareness of the Oriental culture and points out that Byron‘s biographers and critics have skirted his ―Eastern affinities‖ (325). Indeed, amongst the very few scholars who treated this subject seriously, Harold Wiener presents a study of Byron‘s Oriental reading; he is to be given credit for bringing to scholarly attention the 1816 sale catalog of Byron‘s library. One-third of the sale list included volumes directly related to Oriental matter. Albert Tezla also offers a list comprised of seventy-six Oriental works which Byron read and referred to during his literary career.28 ―Seeking a greater understanding of the East,‖ says 28 See Harold Wiener, ―The Eastern Background of Byron‘s Turkish Tales‖ (Diss. Yale University, 1938): 231–53. See also Albert Tezla in his ―Byron‘s Oriental Tales: A Critical Study‖ (Diss. University of Chicago,

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Tezla, ―he added volume after volume to an ever-increasing store of knowledge about this part of the world‖ (29). Yet, no one critic has made an earnest effort to study the Oriental works Byron himself studied and referred to or mentioned in his notes or correspondence, works which he sometimes identified but left unexplained and which, when spelled out, would furnish the Western reader with several fresh dimensions to the understanding of Byron's Oriental scholarship. In the Bride of Abydos, Byron touches upon two main Eastern cultural themes: politics and love. On the political level, Byron must have witnessed some events paralleling those in the Bride of Abydos during his Oriental tour since, at the time, the struggle for power in the Ottoman Empire had resulted in a series of political assassinations inflicted upon and conducted by members of the same ruling families. Besides, Sir Paul Rycaut‘s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1668), which Byron knew very well, is filled with the chronicles of political conspiracies and derangements, which, in fact, were not unlike chronicles of the Western kingdoms and empires. In the tale, such political hostilities are quite apparent. Giaffir poisons his brother in his bid for power. Selim, his nephew, discloses Giaffir‘s secret guilt but refrains from avenging his father‘s death for the sake of Zuleika, his cousin and beloved, who agrees 1952). Amongst Byron‘s critics, John Galt, Byron‘s personal friend and biographer, has almost nothing to say about Byron‘s Oriental reading. He is mainly interested in Byron‘s first visit to the Levant when both men met. See Galt‘s The Life of Lord Byron. Thomas Moore takes Byron‘s Oriental reading seriously enough to reproduce Byron‘s memorandum book of 1807, which lists most of the Oriental works the author had read before the age of sixteen; see The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron. (London: John Murray, 1920; rpt. St. Clair Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, Inc., 1972): 46–49. In The Pilgrim of Eternity (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925), John Drinkwater mentions the 1807 memorandum book, but he drops the final Oriental section from it. Leslie A. Marchand, gives no serious attention to Byron‘s Oriental reading in his otherwise very comprehensive book, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). He mentions Byron‘s early reading of Turkish histories, travel books in general, and the Arabian Nights; but, he says nothing about Byron‘s reading of Firdausi, Sadi, Hafiz, and many other Oriental writers.

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to flee with him after she learns that Selim is a revolutionary leader. Their plan, however, is exposed; Selim is killed, and Zuleika dies of a broken heart. Giaffir is left alone to deplore the loss of his daughter, whom he has worshipped. The political theme in the Bride of Abydos is reminiscent of the Hamletian archetype; in this sense, Byron knew that his Western readers would immediately discern the political issues in his tale. But he was quite certain that the literary matters of the East would go beyond the range of his reader‘s lore. In the Bride of Abydos, Byron employs the traditional Eastern literary conventions upon which an Eastern love tale would be based. His integration of such elements is ample proof of his scholarly awareness of dominant Eastern poets and works such as: Sadi and his song of Mejnoun and Leila, the Eastern myth of the bulbul [―the nightingale‖] and the rose, and Jami and his tale of Yusuf and Zulaykha. Besides enhancing the local color of the East, those Eastern poets, works, and conventions seem to form the circumstantial and thematic backbone of Byron‘s tale. The characters‘ names, personalities, encounters, circumstances, and destinies in Byron's tale and the Eastern ones are almost identical and imposing enough to deserve closer study. In fact, I maintain in this study that Byron used his Eastern scholarship much like an Eastern poet would to expose the traditional Eastern theme of the passionate ideal love. The fact that marriage in the East was a social and political contract falling under patriarchal authority rendered conjugal love rather impossible. Thus, love relationships were reminiscent of physical detachment and of pain and punishment, and the portrayal of such inhibited Eastern love relationships became a literary tradition in the East. One of the earliest and most popular accounts, which knits very well with such a tradition, is that of Antara ibn Shaddad. Implicit marks in its plot and circumstances relate Antara‘s account to Byron‘s Bride of Abydos. Antara and his cousin Abla, like Selim and Zuleika, grew up together and loved each other. According to the custom, Antara had the first right to marry Abla; however, for political and social interests his fierce uncle, an image of Selim‘s uncle, discarded the proposal of Antara, who was the son of a Christian slave mother; Selim‘s mother too was a Christian slave: ‗Son of a slave‘—the Pacha said—

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD From unbelieving mother bred‘ Vain were a father‘s hope to see Aught that beseems a man in thee. ........ He is an Arab to my sight, Or Christian crouching in the fight— (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 81–84; 144–145)

Pacha‘s public contempt of Selim‘s parentage, considered by the Easterners as one of the greatest offenses, inflames the latter to revolt against his own uncle. It is also well known that Antara recited his Mu’allaqa, one of the seven suspended golden Arabic poems, The Mu’allaqat, only after he was scorned by a member of his own tribe for his low matriarchal lineage, and like Selim he also died in a fight.29 What also binds both personalities together is not only their Arabic names but also their traditional Eastern mixture of love and valor, of tender passionate feelings and fatal disguised courage. Although Byron never makes any specific reference to Antara, he must have read about him in Teignmouth‘s edition of Sir William Jones‘s life and works, which Byron listed under ―Biography‖ in the first section of the 1807 memorandum. Jones introduced the poet and translated his poem; he also made a transliteration of the Arabic text in Latin characters in order to show the Arabic meter used in the poems. This strong possibility could explain Byron‘s reading of some Asiatic works ―‗either in the original [in this case the transliteration] or translation.‘‖ The Arabic poet and his work were known to Coleridge, Southey, Shelley, Rogers, and many other Romantics (Al-Hejazi, 26–30). Knowing Byron‘s eagerness for reading about Eastern cultures,—―I shall find employment in making myself a good Oriental scholar,‖ Byron says (BLJ, II, 163)—it is hard to believe that Antara‘s love account and his popular poem

The Mu’allaqu of Antara bin Shaddad is thoroughly discussed and fairly translated by A. J. Arberry in The Seven Odes (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957): 149–84; and by Reynold A. Nicholson in A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1962): 114– 16. 29

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escaped Byron‘s alert mind, especially when he had the work at hand. The direct references Byron makes to other Eastern poets and their works in his Bride of Abydos further demonstrate his genuine awareness of the Eastern literary tradition. In a letter to John Murray, Byron wrote: ―Zuleika is the Persian poetical name for Potipher‘s wife on whom & Joseph there is a long poem—in Persian‖ (BLJ, III, 164). Byron‘s observation echoes D‘Herbelot‘s, who notes in his Bibliotheque Orientale, which Byron knew very well, that the Orientals, mainly the Muslims, often make use of the example of these two lovers, as well as of Mejnoun and Leila, when they not only talk about natural and human love, but also about supernatural and divine love (826). D‘Herbelot, however, does not recount the tale. Byron, who confessed his admiration of the Persian Jami, must have become acquainted with the tale in Teignmouth‘s edition of Sir William Jones‘s translations of Arabic and Persian poetry. Jami‘s Yusuf and Zulaykha, says Jones in one of his letters, is comprised of 4,070 couplets which have ―the pure brilliance of a star‖ (I, 85). In Jami‘s long poem, Zulaykha falls in love with a handsome man who tells her in a dream that he is the vizier of Egypt. When Zulaykha seeks the vizier, she finds him to be an eunuch, and she finds her lover, the faithful and virtuous Yusuf, to be a slave. Zulaykha marries the vizier but tries hard to tempt the slave and fails. Inflamed with passion, she sends Yusuf to prison to soften his heart, but he stands firm in his faith. The vizier dies, and Zulaykha repents and becomes sincere and virtuous, and her love to Yusuf turns spiritual and pure. At this stage, Yusuf‘s heart softens, and he marries her also out of pure love; they finally unite to worship God. Several elements bind the original tale to Byron‘s Bride of Abydos: the name, ―Zulaykha,‖ which is softened to ―Zuleika,‖ and the theme of mistaken identities—both Yusuf and Selim are not what they seem to be, and both are sons of slave mothers. The ideal beauty and the passionate pure love of both heroines, however, are the most striking thematic elements tying both works. In his tale, Jami emphasizes that physical beauty may be a means to discover the beauty of Truth but only if accompanied with passionate love. ―Whoever has no passionate love,‖ says Jami, ―has no heart; and whoever has no pain in his heart is like still water. So to set oneself

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free and enjoy everlasting happiness, one must carry the pains of pure love in his heart‖ (Qtd. Hilal, 260–261). To the Easterners ―Zuleika‖ is associated with ideal beauty and pure passion. To Byron, Zuleika‘s beauty is the ―beau ideal,‖ the beauty of the soul which surpasses that of the body: The light of love—the purity of grace— The mind—the Music breathing from her face! The heart whose softness harmonized the whole— And, oh! that eye was in itself a soul! (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 178–181)

Brief as it is, this description of Zuleika places her amongst the Houri‘s in the Garden of Eden. Byron‘s borrowing of the name of his heroine from a popular Eastern tale, then, coincides with his thematic purposes which are made clearer by his reference to another popular Eastern tale, that of Mejnoun and Leila. Byron begins his first canto with a reference to Sadi‘s song of Mejnoun. Justifying the absence of Zuleika, Selim tells the Pacha: Before the guardian slaves awoke, We to the cypress groves had flown, And made earth, main, and heaven our own! There lingered we, beguiled too long With Mejnoun‘s tale, or Sadi‘s song. (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 68–72)

Byron was aware of the literary significance and implications of the tale of Mejnoun and Leila in Eastern culture. Again D‘Herbelot, in his Bibliotheque Orientale, included two brief entries explaining the terms ―Leila‖ and ―Mejnoun.‖ He affirms that the love story of Mejnoun and Leila, widely known in the Eastern world, provided material for an infinite number of works in prose and verse by Arabic, Persian, and Turkish writers. He, however, neither recounts the tale itself nor identifies the most eminent writers who wrote about it; rather, he presents a selection of a poem written by a Turkish poet as an example (D‘Herbelot, 525). Under ―Mejnoun,‖ D‘Herbelot adds that Leila was considered by the Orientals the most beautiful and chaste of all women. He also relates this tale to the tale of Yusuf and Zulaykha since both tales contemplate mystical theology and divine love (D‘Herbelot, 579–580). D‘Herbelot‘s entries must have stimulated Byron‘s curiosity, but they could never have satisfied it. The above quotation from the

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Bride of Abydos and Byron‘s notes indicate that he read the original tale written by Sadi. In the second section of the 1807 memorandum book, Byron wrote, from memory, a catalog of the poets ―‗who have distinguished their respective languages by their productions.‘ … through other quarters of the world‖ (Moore, 48–49). Six of the eight nations whose poetry Byron had read are Oriental, two of which are Arabia and Persia, whose poets Byron lists as: ―— Ferdousi, author of the Shah Nameh, the Persian Iliad—Sadi, and Hafiz, the immortal Hafiz, the oriental Anacreon‖ (Moore, 48–49). Again, Teignmouth‘s edition seems to be Byron‘s immediate source. Besides, the translation and Latin transliteration of the Arabic Mu’allaqat and a grammar of the Persian language, the edition included Jones‘s selected translations of Sháhnáma by Firdausi, Gulistan [i.e., ―rose garden‖] by Sadi, and the Divan [i.e., ―a collection of poems‖] by Hafiz.30 In his Gulistan, Sadi refers to Mejnoun and Leila: ―Prudent harvesters of reason love‘s deep bliss did never learn:/‗Tis Mejnun reads Laila‘s secret—he whose wits in frenzy burn‖ (Qtd. Nicholson, Translations, 166). In fact ―Mejnoun‖ is the Arabic name for ―madman‖ or ―crazy-man.‖ The name was given to Qais ibn Mulawwah, son of a noble prince of the Arabian tribe of Beni Amr [―the sons of Amr‘]. Like Antara and Abla, Qais and Leila grew up together as cousins. Qais, a poet like Antara, openly expressed his love to Leila in several amorous poems. Annoyed at having Leila‘s reputation ravaged by Qais‘s well-known poems, her father put an end to their conjugBesides Jones‘s work, Byron could have turned to numerous English editions which included these poems in translation and some in the original, as well. The following are some of the translations available at Byron‘s time: Joseph Champion, The Poems of Ferdosi (1785); Stephen Sulivan, Select Fables from Gulistan (1774); Francis Galdwin, A Compendium of Ethics (1788) [the book includes Sadi‘s Pand–Namah]; and Persian Classicks, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1806); John Herbert Harington, The Persian and Arabic Works of Sadi, 2 vols. (1791–1795); Professor Yohannan, The Persian Poetry Fad in England (1770–1825); Stephen Weston, Specimens of Persian Poetry (1805). Blackstone suggests the last two works (326); the rest are listed by Wiener (53). Wiener suggests that ―it is doubtful that he [Byron] ever saw them [the translations]‖ (52). 30

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al relationship by wedding her to a man from another tribe. Deeply shocked and hurt, Qais became insane and spent the rest of his life roaming the desert and composing love verses, which quickly spread amongst the poets in Arabia and Persia. The following is an example of Qais‘s poetry: I am yours, however distant you may be! Your sorrow, when you grieve, brings grief to me. There blows no wind but wafts your scent to me. There sings no bird but calls your name to me. Each memory that has left its trace with me Lingers for ever, as it becomes part of me. (Qtd. Al-Hejazi, 127)

In this poem, Qais conceives Leila as the rose whose scent is carried in the air he breathes; he himself becomes the bird, the bulbul or nightingale, who sings his love poetry to Leila. Although married to another man, Leila remained faithful in her love to Qais until her death. When Qais died, his tribe buried him in a grave next to Leila‘s. Thereafter, Eastern poets immortalized this love story in numerous love poems celebrating the immortality of ideal love. Byron noted that Mejnoun and Leila are the Romeo and Juliet of the East, but he did not recount their tale. The similitude in the circumstances of Byron‘s Bride of Abydos and the Eastern tale are quite distinct. The lovers in both tales are noble cousins passionately in love with each other, yet, deterred from enjoying a blessed life by their guardians‘ determination to wed their daughters to other men. To an Eastern reader, Byron‘s mention of Mejnoun‘s tale at the beginning of his poem would ultimately foreshadow the tragic but ideal destinies of both Selim and Zuleika. On the thematic level, an Eastern reader would also realize that Selim and Zuleika‘s love, much like Antara and Abla‘s and Qais and Leila‘s, is worth all the pain and distress associated with it. According to Sadi, such an ideal love is the only way leading towards the awareness of the everlasting Truth; i.e., God. In this sense, and much like the Romantic‘s circuitous journey which evolves separation, guilt, punishment, redemption, and reconciliation, a pure and passionate love represents a journey into the primal Truth of the world; it purifies man‘s soul, brings it closer to God, and immortalizes it (Hilal, 246). That is to say that in the lovers‘

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acceptance of compulsory physical detachment, which evolves pain and suffering, and their constant spiritual loyalty, their seemingly illegal love becomes legal, pardonable, and ideal. The lovers‘ inhibited hopes to unite with each other on this earth invigorate their hopes to meet in heaven, so they abandon earthly physical pleasures and endure the woeful consequences of their separation to purify their spirits; in doing so, they initiate their unity with the Eternal. In the Bride of Abydos, like Jami and Sadi, Byron affirms that strong passions are purified only by physical detachment. Byron declares in one of his letters that strong passion is the poetry of life (BLJ, VII, 170). And in fact, Byron turned to the East because it was a beckoning world of allure and passion. We do know that for the Romantics, in general, and for Byron, in particular, the poetry of life is a revelation of Truth, a means to approach the realms of idealism. Byron‘s Bride of Abydos is his own poetry of life, his revelation of Truth, and his means to approach idealism. In the fine texture of his Bride of Abydos, Byron asserts that Zuleika and Selim‘s passionate pure feelings break the chains of physical reciprocity and embody the highest form of spiritual love. Their detachment from sensuality and sexuality brings them close to Sufism, an Eastern philosophy enhancing the pure spiritual adoration of the beloved as one of the means to reunite with the Almighty. Commenting on the Bride of Abydos in a letter to Dr. Clarke, Byron wrote that he tried to preserve Zuleika‘s purity (BLJ, III, 199). Furthermore, one must not forget Byron‘s note to Lady Blessington: ―When I attempted to describe Haidèe and Zuleika, I endeavoured to forget all that friction with the world had taught me‖ (Blessington, 196). Such a detachment from the physical world is a characteristic of the Sufi poets. This, however, is not to suggest that, in his Bride of Abydos, Byron presented himself as a Sufi poet, but that he wrote like one. And amongst Byron‘s scholars, Bernard Blackstone is the only one who suggested that Byron‘s Eastern heroines represent the ―allegorical mistresses or youths of Sufi poetry, symbolizing noesis, mystical realization‖ (327). The Sufi poets, however, seek this reunion while they are still alive; Byron, on the other hand, reunites the lovers in heaven. To Byron, Selim and Zuleika‘s ideal deaths are rendered by their strong spiritual passionate love a beginning and not an end; he asserts that after her death Zuleika turns into a rose:

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After death Selim also turns into a ―Bulbul‖ who sings ―so wild and well‖ (CPW, Bride of Abydos, II, ll. 693–703). Both the rose and its bulbul will live forever undisturbed. The rose will ever perfume the bulbul‘s world, and the bulbul will ever sing his love songs to her. The bird reappears at the end of the tale as the spirit—―Invisible his airy wings,‖—of Selim. It sings a powerful and sweet, yet mournful song to the rose, the spirit of Zuleika, which ―Hath flourish‘d; flourisheth this hour,‖ and will flourish forever (CPW, III, Bride, II, ll. 690–732). As Byron indicates in a note to the Giaour, ―the attachment of the nightingale to the rose is a wellknown Persian fable,‖ a myth relating the eternal love between the bird and the flower (CPW, III, 416). The myth is referred to by Jami, in Yusuf and Zulaykha, and by Sadi, in his tale of Mejnoun and Leila. In the Bride of Abydos, the bulbul and the rose cater the idealized setting for the lovers; they act as messengers of love between them; and finally, they represent Selim and Zuleika‘s eternal passionate love and their pure spirits. In this sense, and like all other Eastern elements in the tale, the bulbul and the rose in Byron‘s poem function symbolically and thematically much as they do in Persian and Arabic poetry. Thus, I dare say that so far Byron‘s Oriental scholarship has not been fully apprehended or appreciated. Byron‘s proficient integration of genuine Eastern literary elements in his Bride of Abydos has rendered it certainly Oriental. These Eastern elements, then, are not to be considered as merely superficial and decorative references; they are the core components of the tale. Byron‘s participation in Oriental life and his genuine study of its culture made him think and write like an Oriental poet; they also placed him in the vanguard of Oriental scholars and gave him a feeling both for the

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spirit of Oriental culture and for its expression in his poetic works, especially in his Bride of Abydos, his story and his East.

BYRON AND SUFISM ―Don‘t ask what love can make or do! Look at the colors of the world.‖ (Rumi, 92).

The Romantic ardent contemplation of the other involves the self‘s elimination of physical distractions and the fusion of all disagreeables which hinder wholeness. Such a process is only possible through the medium of ―Love,‖ selfless love, which is the only agent capable of detaching the self from egocentric desires and passions. It follows that the Romantics‘ conception of ―Love‖ concurs with their perception of knowledge and conforms to their understanding of nature. As much as the integrative power of love seems to facilitate the Romantic path to knowledge, the Romantic desire for knowledge seems to be reinforced by the power of their love to humans and to the elements of nature and the universe. The Romantic poets‘ path towards wisdom begins by reconciling the opposite elements which, without love, act one upon the other to block this path. M. H. Abrams heeds Romantic poets as ―primarily poets of love‖ (294–295). The Romantics believed that if ―essential evil‖ separates, then ―Love‖ is the force which ―pulls the sundered parts together‖; this view, Abrams confirms, is shared by the German Hegel and Schiller, and by most British Romantics. Abrams quotes Hegel who confirms that ―Genuine love excludes all opposition‖; ―in love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate‖ (294). Abrams also quotes Blake, who asserts that ―Selfhood‖ is annihilated by the power of pure love: ―Man liveth not by Self alone,‖ but ―by Brotherhood & Universal love‖; and Shelley considers ―Love‖ as ―the bond and sanction which connects not only man with man but with everything which exists‖ (294). Keats contends that self-love vanishes when

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selfhood disappears as it identifies with sensuous objects outside itself (Qtd. by Abrams, 296); and Coleridge believes that love is an essential ingredient to making ―the whole one Self!‖ (Qtd. by Abrams, 296) Abrams also refers to Wordsworth who affirms: Love, now a universal birth, From heart to heart is stealing. From earth to man, from man to earth. (Qtd. Abrams, 296)

Abrams then concludes his discussion by referring to Schelling, who relates the Romantic conception of love to the Romantic understanding of nature: The orbit of love was often enlarged to include the relationship of man to nature as well. The perception that dead nature is really alive, Schelling said, is the result of ―the attraction of inner love and relationship between your own spirit and that which lives in nature.‖ (296)

Thus, Abrams confirms that selfless love is an essential Romantic trait, and he must be commended for skillfully highlighting this feature in Romantic thought. However, he overlooks Byron‘s congenial perception of selfless love by ignoring him completely, and he fails to find the correlation between this Romantic feature and Sufism. To speak of selfless love or selflessness in Byron‘s poetry might seem quite disputable to academicians who consider his works models of the self-centered versus the other. Indeed, the self in Lord Byron is so conspicuous that to speak of selflessness at all seems far-fetched. Byron‘s poetic expression is packed with confrontations between the self and the other, especially the traditional and formalized other. Without denying the existence of these, I suggest that selfless love is an essential feature of some of Byron‘s major poetry, and that this feature is greatly influenced and shaped by his personal interest in and knowledge of Sufism.

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Recent studies have rendered Byron‘s Oriental scholarship common knowledge.31 However, most of these studies have discussed and explained Byron‘s genuine interest in and authentic references to elements of the Eastern culture without investigating the congenital aspects of this culture, Sufism amongst them, which influenced some of his works. Perhaps the only scholar who suggests rather briefly, but ingeniously, Byron‘s kinship to Sufism is Bernard Blackstone, who notes in his ―Byron and Islam: the Triple Eros,‖ that Byron‘s Eastern heroines represent the ―allegorical mistresses or youths of Sufi poetry, symbolizing noesis, mystical realization‖ (327). Also in his Byron: A Survey (1975), Blackstone makes several brief but keen references to Byron‘s interest in Sufism. He points at the poet‘s interest in ―a time-hallowed Sufi tradition,‖ at his ―whole ‗doctrine of love‘, with his Sufic affinities,‖ at his concern in the spiritual death of the Sufi, in ―the death to self brought about by unselfish love,‖ at Byron‘s sense of Dante‘s ―other roots in the Islamic, Sufic civilization,‖ at his ―Sufic world of ascents and descents, of love human and divine intermingling in an iconography of nightingales and roses,‖ at his ―Sufic demands of selfforgetfulness in a love beyond love,‖ and, finally, at ―Byron‘s Sufic imagery‖ (Blackstone, Survey, 49, 78, 142, 174, 196, 206, and 348 respectively). However, Blackstone‘s brief but telling points, geared Such works include Marilyn Butler, ―The Orientalism of Byron‘s Giaour,‖ in Byron and the Limits of Fiction. Ed by Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1988): 78–96; Abdur Raheem Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’ (Lewiston: Mellen University Press, 1995); Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalism (London: Cornell University Press, 1991); John M MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Anahid Melikian, Byron and the East (Beirut: The American University of Beirut, 1977); and Naji B. Oueijan, The Progress of an Image: The East in English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism (London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1994); Byron Porter Smith, Islam in English Literature (New York: Caravan Books, 1977); and Harold Wiener, ―The Eastern Background of Byron‘s Turkish Tales,‖ Diss. (Yale University, 1938). 31

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at stimulating further investigation of the subject, have not found the proper response from Byron‘s Scholars. I hope this work would be one of the possible responses. In Sufism, selfless love and selflessness are synonymous; they cannot be treated as independent features, as the first generates the second. Taken as a mystical order and as a literary movement, Sufism cannot be detached from the organic power of disinterested love, which is its basic path. Indeed, ―Love‖ is a dynamic force enabling the Sufi mystic and poet to free himself from his selfhood, thus, approaching the illuminating stage of oneness. It is a prerequisite for repentance, abstinence, renunciation, and reconciliation; it is the ―path‖ and the ―way‖ for elevated wisdom. Also ―Love‖ enables the Sufi to fix his ―amorous gaze‖ upon the other, be it Man, Nature, or the Universe, to reach the state of ecstatic consummation, the realization of the Unity of Being, of all in the Eternal Allah. Al Ghazzali, a well-known Sufi philosopher, asserts that all objects outside the self become one with it by the gnostic power of Love, which produces the highest bliss in the realization of the self of its union with Allah.32 Indeed, to Al Ghazzali ―Love without gnosis is impossible.‖33 Ibn l‘Arabi, a well-known Sufi poet, affirms: ―Love is the faith I hold.‖34 Abul ‗Ala claims in his wellknown Luzumiyat: Now, mosques and churches—even a Kabeh stone Korans and Bibles—even a martyr‘s bone, All these and more my heart can tolerate, For my religion‘s love and love alone.35

See T. J. De Boer‘s The History of Philosophy in Islam. Trans. Edward R. Jones (New York: Dover Publications, INC., 1967): 166. 33 Quoted in Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975): 130. Schimmel offers a comprehensive discussion of Sufism. 34 Quoted in Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1969): 403. 35 Ameen Rihani, Trans., The Luzumiyat of Abul ‘Ala (Beriut: Albert Rihani, 1978): 77; this is the best literary translation of the work. Rihani, a 32

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Abul ‗Ala‘s ―Love‖ has a reconciliatory power which directs the Sufi towards higher states of awareness exceeding the subjective perception of Man, thus, acting as an agent capable of diffusing the Christian and/or Muslim otherness of God. That the Sufi ―Love‖ is an agent of wisdom resolving all tensions between dogmas should appeal to Lord Byron, who refused to adhere to one dogmatic or philosophic system. The Sufi poet also believes that love and knowledge are coexistent, and that knowledge of the self is incomplete without the self‘s immersion in the outer world. Much like Byron, the Sufi poet affirms that the knowledge of personal experience outweighs that of books or of instruction. It is sought via spontaneous and/or willed participation in and mingling with the outside world, with the unfamiliar other, which is mysterious and inaccessible unless the self transcends itself to fuse with what is beyond it; i.e., to fuse with the other. This process is attainable through love, which enables the union between the beholder and the beheld. At the moment when Self is blissfully conscious of the knowledge of an element of the outer world, it contains the idea of that element and Self and element are united as one reality. But for the self to contain the idea of that element, it must love it first; and to love it, Self must become selfless. Byron‘s passionate fusion with the elements of nature carries his poetry to the level of a private theosophy reflecting his most sublime and mystical insights, a therapeusis of the self and the intellect. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, he echoes the Sufi poets when he says: I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture; I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshy chain, Class‘d among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain well-known Lebanese poet and philosopher, captures the spirit and the prosody of the original text.

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A few Stanzas later, Byron reaffirms his private mystical experiences when he says: Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part Of me and my soul, as I of them? Is not the love of these deep in my heart With a pure passion? (CPW, II, Canto III, Stz.. LXXV)

Compare these Byronic verses to the following lines by Jelaluddin Rumi, a Sufi poet and founder of the Mevlevi order of dervishes: I am dust particles in sunlight. I am the round sun. … I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening. I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff. … I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches. Silence, thought, and voice. The musical air coming through a flute, a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal. Both candle, and the moth crazy around it. Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance. I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy, the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away. What is, and what isn't. You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all, say who

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I am. Say I am You. (Rumi, 275–76)

The above lines imply, if anything, that in a state of pure and passionate love, selfhood and otherhood vanish away. This ―fleshy chain‖ which imprisons the universal soul breaks down to reveal the truth of the eternal harmony and beauty of God. Consciously or unconsciously, Byron seems to advance the Sufi ideal of wuhdat al-wujud, ―the unity of being,‖ which the self cannot approach or perceive unless it is purged by the divine power of selfless love. Like the Sufi poets, Byron found in Nature the very principles of gnosis. To him Nature is a vast panorama of representations which must be loved, comprehended, and interiorized before it can be transcended. Byron here is a contemplative traveler and a lover who sets on a pilgrimage toward perfection and gnosis; he finds forms in nature, which represent Godhead, or Truth. Nature, then, becomes a vast book of Divine Wisdom. Byron‘s obsession with elements of nature as representations of eternal truth is quite often noted by his scholars; it is tactfully noted by his contemporary, John Galt, who personally experienced the Eastern world and its culture. Galt contends that In the air and sea, which have been in all times the emblems of change and similitudes of inconstancy, he [Byron] has discovered the very principles of permanency. The ocean in his view, not by its vastness, its unfathomable depths, and its limitless extent, becomes an image of deity, by its unchangeable character! (361)

For the Sufi, much as for Byron, Nature is a source of spiritual nourishment and a retreat from materialistic life. Byron‘s poetic pilgrimages are aimed at reading deep into this vast book and at redeeming man‘s self-centeredness. And it seems natural for Byron to relate this spiritual nourishment to his mystical fusion with Nature. Another aspect of Sufi selfless love, that which binds a lover to a beloved in an eternal spiritual bond, is clearly manifested in some of Byron‘s major works. Such love defies worldly desires, overpowers death, and enables the lovers to enjoy the ecstasy of

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their union with the Almighty. Perhaps Byron‘s most obvious Sufi expression of selfless love is made in The Giaour: ‗Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire With the angels shared, by Alla given, To lift from earth our low desire, Devotion wafts the mind above, But Heaven itself descends in love; A feeling from Godhead caught, To wean from self each sordid thought; A ray of him who form‘d the whole; A glory circling round the soul! (CPW, III, ll. 1131–1140)

After his separation from Leila, Giaour, the speaker of the above lines, is turned by Byron into a Sufi philosopher or poet commenting on the divine source of selfless love. Here Byron affirms that love is man‘s source of divine illumination. Love ―lift[s] from earth our low desire‖ and invigorates elevated moments of cosmic awareness. Indeed, the above quotation represents the cradle of the Sufi conception of love. Rumi writes: This is Love: to fly heavenward, To read, every instant, a hundred veils. The first moment, to renounce life; The last step, to fare without feet. To regard this world as invisible, Not to see what appears to one‘s self. (Qtd. Kritzeck, 227)

The above lines correspond to Byron‘s affirmation in Don Juan, that the love between Haidèe and Don Juan is that … in which the mind delights To lose itself, when the old world grows dull, And we are sick of its hack sounds and sights. (CPW, V, Canto IV, Stz. xvii, ll. 2–4)

Selfless love, then, leading to the illuminating ecstasy of the mind, floats beyond the physical elements surrounding it. The spiritual fusion of the lover and the beloved, the mingling of the two selves in one, eliminates all sense of ―sounds and sights‖; i.e., of

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time and space. Rumi asserts that when the lover and the beloved are ―so dissolved into love, all qualities of doingness disappear‖ (174). As such, selfless love generates the mystical experience, which Sufi poets like Jami and Sadi celebrate in their poetry. Indeed, both Sadi and Jami emphasize that physical beauty may be a means to discover the beauty of Truth but only if accompanied with passionate and selfless love. Whoever has no passionate love, which is ignited by physical separation, punishment and pain, says Jami, has no heart; thus, to set oneself free and enjoy everlasting happiness, one must carry selfless love in his heart (Hilal, 260–261). According to Sadi, such an ideal love is the only way leading towards the awareness of the everlasting Truth; i.e., God. In this sense, and much like the Romantic‘s circuitous journey, which evolves physical separation, followed by guilt, punishment, redemption and reconciliation, a pure and passionate love represents a journey into the primal Truth of the world; it purifies man‘s soul, brings it closer to God, and immortalizes it (Hilal, 246). I have said elsewhere that in his Bride of Abydos Byron asserts that Zuleika and Selim‘s passionate pure feelings break the chains of physical reciprocity and embody the highest form of spiritual love. Their detachment from sensuality and sexuality brings them close to Sufism, which, as we have seen above, embraces the pure spiritual adoration of the beloved as one of the means to reunite with the Almighty. The ideal selfless love between Selim and his cousin, Zuleika, represented by the Sufi symbols of the bulbul and the rose, warrants an eternal spiritual fusion between both lovers and between both lovers and Allah. At the end of the tale, the bulbul, the spirit—―Invisible his airy wings,‖—of Selim, sings a powerful and sweet song to the rose, the spirit of Zuleika, which ―Hath flourish‘d; flourisheth this hour,‖ and will flourish forever (CPW, Bride, II, ll. 690–732). The ―Bulbul‖ and the rose, then, represent the highest state of eternal synthesis between lovers; they also represent the Sufi ideal that selfless love is divine love. The fact that Byron indicates, in a note to The Giaour, that ―the attachment of the nightingale to the rose is a well-known Persian fable,‖ implies his conscious awareness of the Sufi myth relating the eternal love between the bird and the flower (CPW, II, 416).

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The myth, celebrated by most Sufi poets, is referred to by Jami, in Yusuf and Zulaykha,36 and by Sadi, in his tale of Mejnoun and Leila. And it so seems that Byron‘s borrowings of the names of his heroines from popular Eastern tales, celebrated by Sufi poets, coincides with his thematic purposes and assert, if anything, Byron‘s keen learning and understanding of the Sufi ideals. There is no doubt that Byron‘s personal life was fragmented. That Byron‘s personal love relationships were traumatic to a degree driving him to self-exile is certain, but this must have triggered his interest in some kind of synthesis which he sought in his poetry. His morbid personal affairs drove him to seek ideal selfless love in some of his works. In his letters,37 he notes that the Oriental tales were written to divert his mind from his turbulent relationships. To Lady Blessington he writes: ―When I attempted to describe Haidèe and Zuleika, I endeavoured to forget all that friction with the world had taught me‖ (Qtd. Blessington, 196). Such a willed detachment from the physical world is a characteristic of the Sufi poets. And it so seems that in the selfless love between the poet and Nature and among Giaour and Leila, Selim and Zuleika, and even Don Juan and Haidèe, Byron took love to a level beyond the temporal and spatial, to a level which defies the physical and sensuous and which fuses the souls in an everlasting eagerness, itself capable of diffusing physical pain and of creating the divinely harmonious ―colors of the world.‖ This, however, is not to suggest that Byron was a Sufi poet, but that, when he desired, he wrote like one and that Bernard Blackstone‘s keen hints at Byron‘s interest in Sufism deserve closer attention.

The poem is skillfully translated by Ralph T. E. Griffith; see a section of his translation in James Kritzeck, ed. Anthology of Islamic Literature: 314–18. 37 For instance, in a letter to William Gifford, Byron writes: ―––It [The Bride of Abydos] was written––I cannot say for amusement nor ‗obliged by hunger and request of friends‘ but in a state of mind from circumstances which occasionally occur to ―us youth‖ that rendered it necessary for me to apply my mind to something––anything but reality‖ (BLJ, III, 161). 36

BYRON, DELACROIX AND THE ORIENTAL SUBLIME Among Romantic artists, Delacroix was remarkable for his keen perception of the Sublime in Byron‘s Works. In his Journal, Delacroix acknowledges the impact of Byron‘s poetry on his paintings when he says: ―Always remember certain passages from Byron, they are an unfailing spur to your imagination; they are right for you. … This is sublime, and it is his alone. I feel these things as they can be rendered in painting‖ (40). Byron‘s tragic scenes which involve untamed grief, anger, brutality, and horror, attracted Delacroix because they depicted the most intense and perilous passionate instances in man‘s life. But more than anything else, Byron‘s scenes of men confronting inevitable death or drastic danger left lasting impressions on the French painter. The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, Sardanapalus: A Tragedy, The Prisoner of Chillon, Don Juan, Marino Faliero: An Historical Tragedy, and Mazeppa fired Delacroix‘s imaginative powers. However, in this paper, I will limit my discussion to paintings of scenes of violence, death, and defeat in The Giaour, scenes which generate the Oriental Sublime experience, which Delacroix believed formed the artistic basis of Byron‘s Oriental tales. My discussion is not only intended to reveal the great influence of Byron on Delacroix but also to show how and why Byron and Delacroix actually succeeded in evoking the Oriental Sublime experience in their works via images and scenes of horrifying violence, death, and defeat, images and scenes capturing the inevitable and irrevocable confrontations of Self with Self and with Other. A discussion of the sublime in Byron‘s and Delacroix‘s works, however, cannot be valid if not based on theoretical standards. So much has been written on the Longinus‘s, Burke‘s, and Kant‘s perceptions of the sublime in art and literature, the reason why I will

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try to be brief.38 While the first emphasizes ―excellence and distinction of expression‖ as the main source of the sublime in literature (100), the second contends that the sublime is produced by the emotion of terror, or some passion like it, as long as it ―does not press too close,‖(46) i.e., as long as it does not involve danger. The third considers the sublime as an overwhelming ―outrage‖ to the imagination and categorizes it into ―mathematical‖ or the ―absolutely great‖ in comparison to all around it, and the ―dynamic‖ or that which makes us aware of our helplessness when confronted with the horrifying power of nature (91, 94, 79, and 111). Although the sublime in Byron‘s and Delacroix‘s works does not violate the theories proposed by Longinus, Burke, and Kant, it seems to me that Schiller‘s perception of the sublime may best fit the purposes of this study. Charles H. Hinnant makes an interesting discussion of Schiller‘s perception of the sublime as a reaction to man‘s encounter with the different other—in this study the different other is no other than the Orient and the Orientals, and Self represents the Western reader or spectator. To Schiller, the source of the sublime is phantasmatic terror and fear that ―drives human beings to posit the Other and to achieve security through this Other-not by suppressing or fleeing it by seeking to anticipate it‖ (Hinnant, 126). Though Schiller does not distinguish himself from Burke or Kant, 38 The following are typical works discussing the sublime: Crowther, Paul. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. De Bolla, Peter; The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Goodreau, John R. The Role of the Sublime in Kant’s Moral Metaphysics (Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1998); Guerlac, Suzanne. ―Longinus and the Subject of the Sublime.‖ in NLH, XVI, 2. (Winter 1985): 275-89; Harris, Eileen. ―Burke and Chambers on the Sublime and Beautiful,‖ in Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolph Wittkower (London: Phaidon, 1967): 207-213; Hipple, W. J. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1957); Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIIICentury England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); and Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976).

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however, he goes deeper than both in his analysis of the different other. He claims that ―The custom of the ancient Taureans, to sacrifice to Diana every newcomer [every Other] who had the misfortune to land on their coast, scarcely had any other origin than fear. For only a human being formed in a depraved way and not someone merely unformed is so barbaric that he rages against what can do him no harm‖ (37). Hinnant explains: Schiller's ideas contain the germ of what is developed in philosophical rather than historical terms by Emmanuel Levinas when he describes the habitual mode of Western philosophical discourse as a ―horror‖ of the Other that remains other. … the fear aroused by the Other has to be acted out; no sooner do we represent the Other to ourselves than we experience terror; hence the instantaneous punishment that we mete out to newcomers even as we fear a similar fate for ourselves. In that moment the Other will doubtless be scarcely any different from ourselves, the terrorizer from the terrorized. (127)

This implies that to Schiller Self‘s fear of the unknown and of the external and unconventional powerful and violent realities is a major source of the sublime, which begins with the detachment of Self from Other. This detachment brings forth the nineteenth century Oriental exotic experience, which seems to concur with the Oriental sublime experience in as much as it reflects the detachment between the exote and the exotic, Self and Other. Todorov explains: We cherish the remote because of its remoteness. … Knowledge is incompatible with exoticism, but lack of knowledge is in turn irreconcilable with praise of others; yet praise without knowledge is precisely what exoticism aspires to be. (265)

The exotic experience, like the sublime experience, generates in the subject an interest stimulated by exaggerated ignorance, fear, and illusions. ―The exotic experience is thus to be carefully distinguished from the experience of immersion‖ in the experiences of the other, says Todorov (329). This explains Delacroix‘s conviction that sometimes, the sublime is no more than ―astonishing naiveté‖ (The Journal, 441). The exotic experience like the sublime experience is therefore maintained by the subject‘s immersion in the shocking spectacles of the unfamiliar other rather than in the Other‘s actual

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experience. Thus, Self preserves its proximity from the actual experiences of Other and generates its own exotic and/or sublime pleasure. This association between the sublime and the exotic experiences is necessary for this study as exoticism has for a long time been associated with Orientalism. And indeed, to nineteenth century Western spectators, spectacles of the Orient and Oriental, especially those of violence and terror, were shocking enough to generate both the exotic and the Oriental sublime experience. Hinnant confirms that Delacroix‘s ―The Massacres of Chios‖ (1824), is a typical model of an art work exerting shocking fears in a spectator, who becomes ―aware of the actualities of history through a protective but transparent barrier,‖ and who becomes ―aware of the reality of injustice, not to know the dangers lurking around us is to leave ourselves vulnerable to the dark core of destruction concealed within the world of sensuous beauty‖ (134 and 135). Delacroix himself confesses that ―The terrible is a natural gift in the arts, like charm. … The terrible is like the Sublime, it must never be abused‖ (The Journal 369). He goes on to explain that ―Sublime means everything that is most elevated; perfect, that which is most complete, most finished‖ (The Journal, 391). He believes that theme and medium must stimulate intense passions in the spectator and goes a step further to confirm that great art goes beyond mere beauty in its search for the most profound expressions of truth because real beauty lies not in the visual but in the imaginative: ―The Beautiful [in art] is truth idealized‖ (The Journal, 442). Thus, visual beauty must be sacrificed for a higher goal, the Truth, and it is no other than the vital and horrifying Truth, imposed by a shock on the viewer, that generates the feeling of the sublime. On the other hand, Byron implies his perception of the sublime when he writes in his diary on January 28, 1821: I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except from a precipice – the higher, the more awful, and the more sublime; and, therefore, I am not sure that Fear is not a pleasurable sensation at least, Hope is; and what Hope is there without a deep leaven of Fear? (BLJ, VIII, 37)

The higher the precipice the more fearful, the more beautiful, the more pleasurable, and consequently the more sublime. In his poetry, Byron implies his perception of the sublime in scenes de-

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picting the most horrifying and shocking images of Truth; Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, Cain: A Mystery, and the Oriental tales are typical examples. He further believes that sublime deeds belong to fiery souls (Giaour, ll. 142–149), and that the severe, the austere, the dark, the boundless, the endless, the guilty, the brutal, the Satanic, the fearful, the painful, and the mysterious are reflections of the Truthful, and they are essential sources of the sublime (See CPW, II, Childe , IV, Stz. 146 and Stz. 183; and CPW, V, Don Juan, XV, Stz. 95 and XVI, Stz. 113). Here Byron and Delacroix join most nineteenth century Romantic artists and writers who believed that violent and unpleasant images and subjects become beautiful in art because they represent aspects of the horrifying and shocking realities of human beings, and because these images petrify the reflexes. William Blake represents the shocking realities of life in horrifying images of children locked up in coffins of black, in ―The Chimney Sweeper‖; Coleridge draws the most realistic sublime image of Death and untamed desires in ―The Ancient Mariner‖ and ―Christabel,‖ which Byron praises as a typical sublime poem in a letter to Thomas Moore from Venice, on December 24, 1816. Shelley, in his ―Ode to the West Wind‖ and Prometheus Unbound, evokes horrifying images of nature and man caught up amidst violent incidents exposing man‘s weaknesses and vulnerability as well as his vigor and viciousness. I believe that such images and scenes are nowhere in Romantic art and literature more strongly exposed than in the works of Byron and Delacroix. In Delacroix‘s paintings we observe the painter‘s absorption of human beings who are caught amidst irrevocable yet self inflicted clashes. His colors are violent and expressive of the rapid motion of the action; they contribute to the creation of intense, crucial moments. Dark and gloomy, his colors reflect the mystery of fear and the terror of death. They are unlike the colors used by contemporary Orientalist painters who in their Oriental works used ―brilliant, explosive colours‖ (Stevans, 20). To Delacroix, the Orient was more than an intoxicating spectacle of brilliant light and beauty; it was a world reflecting the most uncontrolled primitive and primal passions and concerns of man. To his audience, he wanted to represent it as an arena of the dark terror man experiences when confronted with the realities of cruelty and with the gloomy mysteries of life and death.

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Like Byron, Delacroix shocks and startles his audience and leaves them with the sense of helplessness and defeat, which according to Schiller contribute to the creation of the sublime moment: we regard the spectacle ―as a might against which our own might accounts to nothing‖ (Qtd. Hinnant, 132). In simple words, the violence exhibited in his paintings drives the spectators to the borders of the valley of hell without pushing them off the abyss. And it is at these borders that the sublime experience is felt. Delacroix‘s The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, which is one of at least six versions painted between 1824 and 1856 of a theme inspired by Lord Byron's poem The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813), is the most expressive of the Oriental sublime.39 The intensity of the confrontation between the combatants is enhanced by the swift action and the terrifying setting. The fighters‘ clocks and their horses‘ manes are blown by the wind and look like ―waves madden as they meet‖; the sharp and deadly weapons are poised and ready to pierce the flesh of the opponent; and the fatal gazes of the ―accursed Giaour‖ and Hassan reveal the vicious nature of man. All these contribute to the intensity and brutality of the encounter. Thus, the most sublime in the painting is the horrifying deathdealing moment, which Delacroix captures so realistically. Here the spectator‘s imagination is fired into a higher and more passionate feeling of distanced horror. Byron‘s description of the deathdealing encounter between the combatants is no less effective than Delacroix‘s painting: Thus—as the stream and ocean greet, With waves that madden as they meet— Thus join the bands, whom mutual wrong, And fate, and fury, drive along. The bickering sabres' shivering jar; And pealing wide or ringing near, Its echoes on the throbbing ear, The other paintings are: Scéne de la guerre actuuell entre les Turcs et les (Grecs) or Crecs (1827); Un officer turk tué dans les montaignes (1827); Combat du Giaour et du Pasha (1835); Combat du Giaour et du Pasha (1856); Le Giaour poursuivant les ravisseurs de sa femme (1849); and Giaour au bord de la mer (1849). 39

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The deathshot hissing from afar; The shock-the shout-the groan of war; Reverberate along that vale. (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 632–641)

Byron‘s power images of the death-dealing encounter prompted Delacroix to paint four other works: Scene from the War between the Turks and Greeks, The Combat between the Greek and Turk, A Turkish Officer Killed in the Mountains, The Giaour Contemplating the Death of Hassan, all of which correspond to the following lines by Byron: With half the fervour Hate bestows Upon the last embrace of foes, When grappling in the fight they fold Those arms that ne'er shall lose their hold; Friends meet to part; Love laughs at faith; True foes, once met, are joined till death! With sabre shiver'd to the hilt, Yet dripping with the blood he spilt; Yet strain'd within the sever'd hand, Which quivers round that faithless brand; His turban far behind him roll'd, And cleft in twain its firmest fold; His flowing robe by falchion torn, And crimson as those clouds of morn That, streak'd with dusky red, portend The day shall have a stormy end; A stain on every bush that bore A fragment of his palampore; His breast with wounds unnumber'd riven, His back to earth, his face to heaven, Fall'n Hassan lies—his unclos'd eye Yet lowering on his enemy, As if the hour that seal'd his fate, Surviving left his quenchless hate; And o'er him bends that foe with brow As dark as this that bled below.— (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 649–654; 655–665; and 667–674)

In his poem, Byron surpasses Delacroix because he generates the sublime by not only pushing the reader to the sharp edge of the precipice but by also carrying him higher to the borderline separat-

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ing heaven from hell; i.e., Byron‘s reader experiences the sublime of the beautiful (the ecstatic setting) and of the terrible (the sinful and deadly fight). Byron introduces his tale with a paradise-like description of Greece, and the scene where the combat is to take place is contrasted to the cruelty of those men who dwell in it: ―Fair clime where every season smiles,‖ ―As if for gods, a dwellingplace,‖ are contrasted to ―So soft the scene, so form‘d for joy,/So curst the tyrants that destroy‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 7, 47, and 66– 67). Also Leila‘s fair and heavenly beauty is contrasted to the brutality of ―Black‖ and ―Stern‖ Hassan. Another scene enhancing this contrast is Giaour at his deathbed; he is neither repentant nor willing to ask for redemption when he confesses his guilt to a priest: ―I want no paradise, but rest,‖ says Giaour (CPW, III, Giaour, l. 1270). Delacroix captures these moments in a painting, The Confession of the Giaour, which I believe is a masterpiece of the sublime of guilt and defeat. The background of dark brown and the cloaks of black are indicative of a cell more like a dark coffin. Giaour‘s pale face reveals the images of defeat, of the graveness of guilt and pain, and of the shadow of death approaching, but the glowing eyes are far too reaching as they recall the images of black Hassan and of bright Leila, whose deaths lay heavy on his heart. Whether love could produce so much violence and cruelty is the question Delacroix successfully poses in his painting. However, Delacroix‘s most powerful sublime image is made when he portrays in the hands of the priest the rosary and its Cross and, in the background on the wall, the armor which has been used to kill Hassan; the contrast is that of life and death, of salvation and doom. This sublime image is surpassed only by Byron‘s tantalizing image of Giaour: Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl. The flash of that dilating eye Reveals too much of times gone by; … From him the half-affrighted Frair When met alone would retire, As if that eye and bitter smile Transferr‘d to others fear and guile: …

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But sadder still it is to trace What once were feelings in that face. (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 832–835; 846–849; and 859–860)

Byron ends his tale with a gloomy image of life in death; this is the horrifying image of the death of the unrepentant Giaour. This image is contrasted to the bright images of the Eastern climes and the divine beauty of Leila, and the reader is left with a feeling of outrage and horror and the illusion of being at the brim of the horrible hell. This spectacle engenders the sublime experience, which as Schiller confirms, affords the reader with a chance for salvation ―not in ignorance of the dangers camped around us—for ultimately this ignorance must come to an end—but only in the acquaintance with these dangers‖ (Qtd. Hinnant, 132). To sum up, Byron‘s influence on the generation of the Oriental sublime in Delacroix‘s paintings as well as in his readers cannot be doubted. After all, Delacroix placed Byron on the same level as Dante, Shakespeare, and Michelangelo. To see how Delacroix‘s debt to Byron manifests itself in paintings exhibiting Oriental sublime scenes is to appreciate Byron‘s sublime Oriental poetic images. Here, I would like to isolate a central, distinctive Byronian strain of thought in the Oriental tales, and specifically in The Giaour; it presents itself in a peculiar combination of Oriental scenes of violence, death, and defeat amidst stunning scenes of human and landscape beauty and splendor. In doing this, Byron goes beyond Delacroix in his portrayal of this shocking and contrasting sublime, which is paramount to the tales thematic exposition and to the creation of the uplifting Oriental experience.

BYRON’S OVERPOWERING SEXUAL AND SPIRITUAL IDENTITY In the East and the West, Byron took advantage of opportunities to satisfy his bisexual desires without restraint. No doubt his erotic affairs in the East were no match to his scandalous ones in England, affairs which were placed under the microscopic critical eyes of the British society. However, I believe it would be an oversimplification to perceive those affairs as indicative of an identity overpowered by mere sensuality. In one of his letters, Byron confesses: ―I have outlived all my appetites and most of my vanities aye even the vanity of authorship,‖ (BLJ, II, 48). This confession implies if anything that a sketch of Byron‘s real identity should be based not only on his personal life and correspondence but also on his works, especially his Oriental tales and the Turkish cantos of Don Juan, all of which reveal a complex identity exhibiting an amalgam of the overpowering sensual and spiritual in Self. Love affairs in Byron‘s personal life and in the above mentioned works range from the erotic and lustful to the pure and spiritual; indeed, this particular blend generates dramatic tensions between Self and Self and Self and Other. These tensions culminate in images of sensuality demeaning Self and Other or in images of spirituality redeeming Self and Other. Those images, I contend, become locus for revealing Byron‘s overpowering sexual and spiritual identity. Jonathan Gross, in his Byron: The Erotic Liberal, confirms that ―eros, in tension with libertinism, shaped Byron‘s private and public life,‖ and that the poet ―resolved the tension between eros and libertinism, in part, by using his poetry to define a new political outlook—erotic liberalism—which he referred to in his letters as a ‗politics of feelings‘‖ (1). Gross then refers to Aristophanes‘s perception of eros as ―the search for wholeness,‖ or the search for the other half, the other sex and clarifies that ―Byron‘s erotic relationships evince this [his] desire for self-improvement‖ (2–3). Gross‘s remarkable argument, though geared towards exposing the impact of Byron‘s liberal eroticism on his politics, is significant to my work

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as it supports my contention that the poet employs his personal and public affairs in his works to exhibit a complex personality constructed by a complex set of ideals, seemingly contradictory but actually complimentary. On the personal level, Lord Byron indulged himself in several scandalous sensual relationships with women of all classes—with whores, with country girls, and with women of the high society before, during,40 and after his first Eastern tour, the most fêted was with Lady Caroline Lamb. These relationships were indeed sensual, but they invigorated his contempt of Self and Other, of himself and of women, and left him at times disillusioned with his perception of idealized love. They also reconfirmed his revulsion and detestation of affairs devoid of spiritual love and true emotions. He writes to his friend Francis Hodgson, ―I have one request to make, which is, never to mention a woman again in any letter to me, or even allude to the existence of the sex‖ (BLJ, II, 163). To Lady Melbourne he confesses: ―I have no very high opinion of your sex‖ (BLJ, II, 208). And to Lady Hardy he writes, ―Indeed I rather look on love as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or to break in order to keep the world agoing, but by no means a sinecure to parties concerned‖ (Qtd. Marchand, Portrait, 392). Here, Byron perceives spiritless love-making as a lustful act with intimidating consequences demeaning Self and Other. On the other side, Byron raises some of his personal love relationships to the level of spiritual and emotional idealization; for instance, his early attachments to Mary Duff, Margret Parker, and Mary Chaworth, or his later love affections to the Macri sisters, relationships which exhibit another facet of his complex personality: that of the romantic, emotional, and spiritual lover. From the East he writes about his purely emotional attachment to three Greek beauties and ends by asserting: ―I am tolerably sick of vice which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, …—I am very serious and cynical, and a good deal disposed to moralize‖ (BLJ, I, 240– 241). His moralization at that period of time implies if anything 40 In one of his letters, Byron confesses, ―I had a number of Greek and Turkish women‖ (BLJ, II, 46), one of whom he celebrated in The Bride of Abydos.

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that his spiritual relationship to those beauties acted as a purging agent for his soul. Leslie Marchand confirms that Byron‘s relationship to the Greek beauties was pure and Platonic (Portrait, 80). He goes as far as asserting that ―After the sophistication bred by his Eastern travels, there seems little reason to doubt that his feeling at the time [1811, even] for Edleston was ‗a violent though pure, love and passion‘—in other words, a romantic attachment. And the best evidence is that the most idealized of Byron‘s attachments were those that still bore the aura of innocence, such as his love for Mary Duff, Margret Parker, and Mary Chaworth‖ (Portrait, 38). Could the above mentioned intense and innocent relationships be indirectly represented in the love relationships between Selim and Zuleika, Giaour and Leila, and Conrad and Medora? Byron raises love relationships in most of his Oriental tales to the aura of spirituality. He even raises several of his female characters to the level of devotional Sufism, as in the cases of Leila, Zuleika, and Haidèe, whom he draws as iconographic representations of divine love, beauty, and innocence; yet, at other times he lowers other characters to the lowest levels of physical consummation, as in the cases of Dona Julia, Gulbeyaz, and Gulnare, all of whom assume the role of the Eastern phallic women in their revolt against the masculine Eastern tradition by attempting to secure their overpowering sexuality through physical seduction. It is of particular significance that Byron confesses to Lord Holland that The Bride of Abydos is his story and his East (BLJ, III, 168). If one interprets this confession literally, one reads the tale as Byron‘s love story in the East. This interpretation becomes more probable when he later confirms that the tale is based on personal experience. To John Galt, he writes that the first part of the Bride, the part where Byron creates the most elevated and refined of love stories between Selim and his cousin Zuleika, ―was drawn from observations of mine‖ (BLJ, III, 196). And about the character of Zuleika, Byron writes: ―I have a living character in my eye for Zuleika—‖ (BLJ, III, 195). Marchand believes that ―the model for Zuleika was perhaps a composite of his feelings for Augusta [Byron‘s half-sister] and Lady Francis Webster [his lover at the time]‖ (BLJ, III, 195). And indeed, a Western reader may relate the tale to

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Byron‘s suspected incestuous relationship with Augusta. But Byron calls his female character ―Zuleika,‖ an Eastern name embodying purity and devotion,41 and makes it clear in one of his letters to John Murray that ―Zuleika is the Persian poetical name for Potipher‘s wife of whom & Joseph there is a long poem—in the Persian‖ (BLJ, III, 164). This and his references at the beginning of the tale to ―Mejnoun‘s tale, or Sadi‘s song‖ (CPW, III, Bride, I, ll. 71-72) and to the rose and the ―bulbul‖ or the nightingale diffuse the sensual and incestuous allusions, especially to an Eastern reader or to a Western one who is fairly acquainted with the spiritual love tradition in Eastern mythologies, especially the ones exposed in the spiritual Love accounts between Mejnoun and Leila or between the Bulbul and the Rose. Selim is a genuine model of Mejnoun or of the ―bulbul‖ of Sad‘s song, and his cousin Zuleika, is a model of Mejnoun‘s beloved Leila or of the ―bulbul‘s‖ beloved rose. Byron makes it clear that they both suffer the spasms of physical detachment, and they both die because their spiritual love cannot and should not be stained by sensuality. After Selim‘s death, the rose or Zulieka turns ―meek and pale‖ (CPW, III, Bride, II, 1. 672) and dies herself, and the bird reappears as the spirit—―Invisible his airy wings,‖—of Selim to sing a ―mournful‖ song to the rose (CPW, III, Bride, II, 11. 690–98). Above and beyond, Byron is keen at placing his ―story,‖ his Bride, in an Eastern setting ―Where the virgins [like Zuleika] are soft as the roses they twine‖ (CPW, III, Bride, I, l. 14). Accordingly, Byron‘s story may be read as an embodiment of the most pure, innocent, and devotional love affairs. In it he creates a love-alter where Self and Other are redeemed through physical detachment and spiritual love. This love-alter appears again in The Giaour, with Giaour or Mejnoun and Leila or the Rose, with the ―Sultana of the Nightingale‖ and ―the garden queen‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, 11. 21–26). Giaour describes Leila as ―a form of life and light—‖ and as his ―life‘s unerring light—‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 894–95; ll. 112, 1145). This association of the beloved with ―unerring light‖ implies her divine 41 The name is fully explained in Naji Oueijan‘s A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron’s Oriental Tales (New York: Peter Lang, 1999): 125126.

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purity and innocence. As Zuleika represents ―The light of love— [and] the purity of grace—‖ (CPW, III, Bride, I, l. 178), Leila represents the innocent soul: ―Yea, soul, and should our prophet say/That form was nought but breathing clay‖ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 480–81). In The Corsair, Byron places in the center of Medora‘s heart ―a sepulchral lamp/[that] Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen‖ (CPW, III, Corsair, I, ll. 351–52)—this flame represents divine spiritual love Byron himself beseeches, if not in reality, in his imagination. And indeed, Byron‘s overpowering spirituality cannot be contested in the following lines: ‗Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire With angels shared, by Allah given, To lift from earth our low desire. Devotion wafts the mind above, But Heaven itself descends in love; A feeling from the Godhead caught, To wean from self each sordid thought; A ray of him who form‘d the whole; A glory circling round the soul!‘ (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 1131–1140)

For an Eastern reader, the above verse lines bring to mind Rumi‘s verses: This is Love: to fly heavenward, To rend, every instant, a hundred veils. The first moment to, renounce life; The last step, to fare without feet. To regard this world as invisible, Not to see what appears to one‘s self. (Qtd. Kritzeck, 227–228)

Rumi, the most well-known of the Sufi poets, describes the bliss of his heart when it ―entered the circle of lovers,/To look beyond the range of the eye,/To penetrate the windings of the bosom‖ (Qtd. Kritzeck, 227–228). There is no need to point out the similarities between the verses of Byron and those of Rumi; they are typical of the Sufi love poetry, the kind of poetry intended to redeem Self and uplift it to the level of divinity. In this sense, Zuleika, Leila, and Medora become Byron‘s icons of spirituality and divinity. This iconographic representation, however, is not limited

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to some of Byron‘s Eastern female characters. In The Siege of Corinth, Francesca is another icon of spirituality; she is a rose—―The rose was yet upon her [Francesca‘s] cheek,‖—with an innocent love to Alp. But here, again, both the pure rose and her lover perish before their love is stained by sensuality. This flare of passionate and pure love, which Byron implants in the hearts of some of his tale‘s characters, cannot but reflect the passions of his inner Self, a Self which forms a genuine platform for an overpowering sensitive and romantic spiritual identity. On the other hand, Byron portrays several Oriental characters, like Seyd, Giaffir, Hassan, Conrad, and Pacha, as men whose passions are almost always lustful and/or destructive. Robert Gleckner asserts that most of Byron‘s heroes are slaves of their passions of love (104). As said above, Byron himself was, at different phases of his life, slave to his physical passions. Such passions exhibit Self in its lowest chapters. This side of Byron‘s identity, the overpowering sensual one, is best exhibited in the Turkish cantos of Don Juan, in which he projects the obsession of the Turkish Sultan, who exploits Gulbeyaz, three other wives, and fifteen hundred concubines in his harem, in sexual fetish. To Byron, however, the overpowering sexuality of the Oriental masculine is not different from that of the Western one; the only difference is that the first is legal while the second is not. This translates his escape from his own British society, which perceived his overpowering sexuality in England as illegal and scandalous. Also, to Byron the sexuality and brutality of the Western Giaour and Conrad are not better or worse than those of the Eastern Hassan, Seyd Pacha, and Giaffir Pacha. However, in the West, Giaour‘s and Conrad‘s overpowering sexuality would be condemned by the society, while in the East the overpowering lust of the Turkish Sultan, and of Hassan, Seyd Pacha, and Giaffir Pacha would be accepted as common practice. Byron, however, seems to condemn those practices. Almost all of Byron‘s Western and Eastern masculine characters end up overwhelmed by reprehensible guilt, shame, and remorse. Thus, by creating such characters Byron is demeaning not only the lustful Other but also the sensual Self. This sensual and lustful side of Self and Other categorizes some of his female characters, as well; for instance, Gulbeyaz, in Don Juan and Gulnare, in The Corsair. This drives Alan Richardson to write: ―The Oriental woman becomes a signifier of the erotic in Byron

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and in British romantic poetry generally‖ (177), but this is only partly true of some Oriental female characters. In Don Juan, Byron plays a masterful game of gender tension when he offers the male the role of the female and vice versa. Juan becomes Juanna when disguised in a female dress in the harem of the Turkish Sultan; he takes the guise of a she and succumbs to Gulbeyaz‘s overpowering sensual desires.42 In The Corsair, Gulnare‘s obsessive sensual desire drives her to kill the Pacha and free Conrad from prison. Thus, both female characters take the role of the phallic woman. Besides, in Lara, Gulnare reappears as the disguised page, Khaled. In this sense, Caroline Frankline argues that the ―Turkish cantos [in Don Juan] problematize feminism from a masculine viewpoint, by counterpointing the blunt defiance any self-respecting man (Juan) would express if treated as a female concubine with the repulsion he feels for a woman who rejects ‗feminine‘ subservience altogether in making a sexual advance on her own account,‖ (151).43 But, again, this image of the phallic Eastern 42 Alan Richardson and David Waterman make interesting discussions of the issue. See Alan Richardson‘s ―Escape from the Seraglio: Cultural Transvestism in Don Juan,‖ in Rereading Byron: Essays Selected from Hofstra University’s Byron Bicentennial Conference. Ed. Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane. New York: Garland, 1993, 175-185; and David F. Waterman‘s ―Byron‘s Reflexive Orientalism in Cantos V and VI of Don Juan,‖ in Études Anglaises, 49:1 (January 1996): 29–39. 43 A tremendous number of seminal works appeared on Byron‘s perception of the female in his works, especially the Oriental tales. See for instance: Doris Langley Moore‘s ―Byron‘s Sexual Ambivalence,‖ Appendix 2, in Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (London: John Murray, 1974): 437456; Suzan Wolfson‘s ―Their she Condition: Cross-dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan,‖ in ELH 54:3 (fall 1987): 585-617; Marlon Ross‘s ―Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in the Crisis of Poetic Identity,‖ in Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988): 26-51; Sonia Hofkson‘s ―The Writer‘s Ravishment: Women and Romantic Author—the Example of Byron,‖ in Romanticism and Feminism, 93-114; Marilyn Butler‘s ―The Orientalism of Byron‘s Giaour,‖ in Byron and the Limits of Fiction. Ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988): 78-96; Malcolm Kelsall‘s ―Byron and the Woman of the Harem,‖ in Rereading Byron: Essays Selected from Hofstra University’s Byron Bicentennial

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female in Byron‘s works is not different from that of the Western female. Donna Inez, Juan‘s mother, and Donna Julia, his lover, are Western images of Gulbeyaz and Gulnare, who assume the role of phallic women. The first tries to secure her masculinity by controlling her husband and the second by tempting Juan. Thus, in Don Juan and the Oriental tales, Byron generates gender tensions and erotic relationships geared at criticism of Self as well as of Other. In short, sexuality, I believe, in Don Juan and the Oriental tales is partially based on Aristophanes‘ definitions of eros as ―a search for wholeness,‖ or as ―an act of mental recovery,‖ which ―evince this desire for self-improvement‖ (Qtd. Gross, 2–3). In this respect, images of sexuality in Byron‘s works generate the opportunity for self discovery and mental recovery. Also, Marlon Ross‘s statement, that ―Byron‘s stories always involve his own selfquesting‖ (37), verifies my belief that Byron‘s personal affairs form the core of most of his works. And I can go as far as asserting that these works represent Byron‘s self-inflicted double quests: the first for sensual fulfillment, the second for spiritual redemption. Both quests are geared toward location and revelation of Self and Other as well as for location and salvation of Self and Other.

Conference. Ed. Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane (New York: Garland, 1993): 165-173; Jerome Christensen‘s ―Perversion, Parody, and Cultural Hegemony: Lord Byron‘s Oriental Tales,‖ in SAQ 88:3 (Summer 1989): 569-603.

BYRON, D’HERBELOT AND ORIENTAL CULTURE Byron‘s personal contacts with Easterners and his ardent involvement in their daily affairs expanded and substantiated his knowledge of Oriental life and cultures. Although he did not have a satisfactory knowledge of Eastern languages, except for Greek and some Armenian, he made remarkable references to Eastern cultural elements, especially in his Oriental tales. Those references indicate, if anything, his genuine knowledge of Eastern histories and literatures, which he acquired from both his being on the spot and from his personal readings, the most remarkable of which include Sir William Jones‘s dexterous translations of Eastern Literature, the Arabian Nights Entertainment, and Barthélémy D‘Herbelot‘s comprehensive dictionary of Oriental culture, Bibliothèque Orientale (1776). Those works, besides several others,44 attracted his inquisitive mind, and ―To the East‖ says Count Gamba, ―he had looked, with the eyes of romance, from his very childhood‖ (Qtd. Moore, 119). In this chapter, I discuss Byron‘s reading of D‘Herbelot in the first of the Oriental tales, The Giaour, with emphasis on one figurative device, which exposes the aesthetic and thematic veneer of the tale and proves, if anything, that Byron‘s use of Oriental matter is quite similar to that of Oriental poets. D‘Herbelot‘s Bibliothèque Orientale is mentioned in the three sale catalogues, recently edited by Peter Cochran.45 Thomas Moore For a List of Byron‘s reading of Oriental matter, refer to Naji Oueijan, A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron’s Oriental Tales (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1996): 171–176. 45 See Peter Cochran. Ed. Byron’s Library: The Three Book Sale Catalogues. Available at: 44

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was the first to reproduce a memorandum book (1807), which listed most of the Oriental works Byron had read before the age of sixteen. Harold Wiener brought the 1816 sale catalog of Byron‘s library to scholarly attention, and Albert Tezla offered lists of the Oriental works Byron read and referred to during his literary career. It is telling that one third of the 374 works that appeared in the 1816 sale catalog of Byron‘s library were volumes about the Orient (including seventeen works in French).46 The most significant reference Byron makes to the Bibliothèque Orientale is in his first Oriental tale, The Giaour. Byron‘s Fisherman, the narrator of a section of the verse tale, exalts the beauty of Leila‘s eyes and compares their sparks to those of the jewel of ―Giamschid‖: Her eye's dark charm 'twere vain to tell, But gaze on that of the Gazelle, It will assist thy fancy well, As large, as languishingly dark, But Soul beam'd forth in every spark

http://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/byrons_library.pdf 46 The works that are marked with asterisks (*) are mentioned in Byron‘s letters, journals, and notes and are listed in the 1816 sale catalog of Byron‘s library. In compiling this list, I am indebted partly to Wiener and partly to Tezla. History and Religion: *Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1687). Beaujour, Félix de. Tableau du Commerce de la Grèce (1800). Castellan, A. L. Moeurs,Usages Costumes des Othomans,et Abrégé de Leur Histoire (1812). D‘Ohsson, Mouradja. Tableau Générale de l’empire Othoman (1787– 1790). Journandes. De Getarum Origine (1597). *Moreri, Louis. Grand Dictionnaire Historique (1759). Sainte-Croix. Mystères du Paganisme (n.d.). De Vertot, René Aubert. Histoire des Révolutions Arrivées dans le Gouvernement de la République Romaine (n.d.). Language and Literature: Croix, Petite De La. Contes Persans (1709).*D‘Herbelot, Barthélémy. Bibliothèque Orientale (1776). *Pauli, Demetrii. Lexicon Tripartitum Linguae Graecae Hodiernae, Italicae et Gallicae (1790). *Stephani Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (1815). Travel Literature: *Chardin, Jean. Voyages en Perse (1811). *Eugene, Prince. Memoirs of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1811). Pouqueville, François. Voyage en Morée (1805). Stephanopoli, D. and N. Voyage de Stephanopoli en Grèce (1800). Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. Voyages en Turquie, en Perse, et aux Indes (1677–1678).

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That darted from beneath the lid, Bright as the jewel of Giamschid. (CPW, III, Giaour, ll. 473–479)

At first reading, this description may seem to bring into mind the ancient Greek and Roman poets‘ descriptions of the female goddesses such as Aphrodite and Venus. However, at closer reading and investigation of the simile in the last line, ―Bright as the jewel of Giamschid,‖ one cannot but appreciate Byron‘s aesthetic craftsmanship and authentic knowledge of Eastern History and Literature. According to Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Byron first intended to change the last line of the quotation above into ―Bright as the ruby of Giamschid‖, but to this Moore objected, ―that as the comparison of his heroine‘s eye to a ruby might unluckily call up the idea of its being bloodshot, he had better change the line to ‗Bright as the jewel‘,‖ which Byron did change (WLB, III, 148). Known for his insistence on the authenticity of his sources, Byron added a note explaining the meanings of this jewel: The celebrated fabulous ruby of Sultan Giamschid, the embellisher of Istakhar; from its splendour, named Schebgerag [Schabchirāgh], ―the torch of night;‖ also ―the cup of the sun,‖ etc. In the First Edition, ―Giamschid‖ was written as a word of three syllables; so D‘Herbelot has it; but I am told Richardson reduces it to a dissyllable, and writes ―Jamshid.‖ I have left in the text the orthography of the one with the pronunciation of the other. (CPW, III, 418)

Despite the fact that Samuel Richardson‘s disyllable is the standard spelling and pronunciation of the name of the jewel, Byron kept D‘Herbelot‘s version because he believed D‘Herbelot‘s Oriental scholarship overshadowed Richardson‘s. Besides, Byron was seriously interested in the French entry explaining the background and significance of the term and the myth behind it. D‘Herbelot explains in the first paragraph of a long entry that Giamschid is the name of The fourth king of the race or dynasty of the Pischdadiens, which was the first of the Persian kings, was the brother or the nephew of Tahamurath his predecessor. His name was Giam

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Giamschid, D‘Herbelot further explains, built a fertile city, known to the Greeks of the time as Presepolis. During the building of this city, a turquoise vase which contained four liters of liquor was found and offered to Giamschid. The vase or goblet was decorated with ruby gems; it was not only so precious but also mysterious as it possessed powers revealing the truth of the world. It was named by his excellence Giamschid, a term signifying in Persian ―Sunrise.‖ When Istekhar was finished, this legendary Persian king entered the city and made it the ‗Liege‘ of his Empire. This coincided with the entering of the Sun into the sign of Aries. That day was called ―Neuruz‖ by the Persians, which means the New Day, which also was made the first day of the Solar Persian calendar (first day of spring). Ruling for around seven hundred years, Giamschid believed himself immortal, acted as god, and asked his people to worship him as one. This angered the Almighty God, who sent him an enemy who banished Giamschid forever from his empire. Several Persian poets, whom D‘Herbelot referred to in his work and who are mentioned by Byron in his correspondence, celebrated Giamschid and his gemmed goblet to the point of exaggeration. Firdausi, the author of sixty thousand verses recounting the history of the kings of Persia in a work titled Schahnameh, writes: He [Jamshid] searched among the rocks for stones whose luster Attracted him and soul on many a jewel, "GIAMSCHID, quatrieme Roy de la race ou dynastie des Pifchdadiens, qui eft la premiere des Roys de Perfe, atoit frere ou neveu de Tahamurath fon preddceffeur. Son nom propre dtoit Giam ou Gem, & on y ajonta celuy de Schid, qui, dans la langue des anciens Perfans, fignifie le Soleil, a caufe de la grande beautd & majeftd de fon vifage , qui dbloilifibit les yeux de tous ceux qui le regardoient fixement, ou bien, felon quelques Auteurs caufe de reclat de fes grandes atbons‖ (Vol. II, p.132). Translation into English of all French quotations from the Bibliothèque Orientale are made by Maya Yazigi. 47

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As rubies, amber, silver, gold. Jamshid Unlocked their doors and brought them forth by spell. … There the shah Whose word was law, sat sunlike in mid air. (Sháhnáma, 133)

In his note, Byron refers to Giamschid as ―the cup of the sun,‖ a description attested by D‘Herbelot and frequently used by the Persian poets. D‘Herbelot provides ample space in his work for all the above mentioned Persian poets without publishing their poetry. But, it is certain that Byron had read those Persian poets in Sir William Jones‘s translations of Persian poetry. Byron acknowledges their significance in the following comment: ―—Firdausi, author of the Shah Nameh, the Persian Iliad—Sadi, and Hafiz, the immortal Hafiz, the oriental Anacreon‖ (Moore, 48–49). And it seems that in his verse tale, Byron refers to D‘Herbelot to testify his interest in accuracy and to satisfy the curiosity of his readers, whom he knew would not completely perceive his salient use of the Oriental simile, which, if read by an informed reader, would certainly confirm Byron‘s genuine Oriental scholarship. It is significant to note here that Byron‘s Fisherman does not compare Leila‘s beauty to Giamschid but to the gem this legendary king possessed: ―Bright as the jewel of Giamschid.‖ And as I mentioned before, Byron‘s first intention was to change the line in his Giaour into ―Bright as the ruby of Giamschid,‖ but consented to the request of Moore, who warned Byron of the association of the ruby with blood—the precious blood which in the tale is shed because of Leila‘s beauty and her love to Giaour. Byron, here, strikes a masterful thematic cord when he refers to Giamschid, whose mythology communicates very well the tragic action in The Giaour. Hassan, like Giamschid, acts like a god when he gives orders to drown his pure jewel, Leila, in the sea. Byron, who is the almighty of his own narrative tale, sends Giaour to banish Hassan from the earth. Giaour slaughters Hassan, and both lose Leila, this jewel of perfect beauty and purity. Besides, the liquor in Giamschid‘s goblet, which Hafiz asserts contains red wine, symbolizes the innocent blood of Leila sacrificed in the tale. This image then exposes the main theme of the tale—the most beautiful and pure is almost always destroyed by man‘s brutality and pomp. Here, one wonders

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whether Leila is a symbol of beautiful Greece, which had then been destroyed by the Ottoman sultans for decades. Whether she is or not, Byron seems to expose the best and worst in man in his tale. He also seems to proclaim that purity and beauty are quite often blood-stained by man‘s ignorance and arrogance. This thematic binary flavors most if not all of Byron‘s Oriental tales as it seasons most, if not all, Oriental tales told by Oriental story-tellers, whose main interest was always to capture the attention and stir the imagination and emotions of their listeners. Thus, the splendor of Byron‘s Oriental simile lies in its thematic indications, but it also lies in its rich figurative and aesthetic implications. The Fisherman asks his readers to fancy the spark ―That darted from beneath the lid‖ of Leila ―Bright as the jewel of Giamschid.‖ Here Byron, through his Fisherman, becomes a traditional, skilled Oriental storyteller. Martha Pike Conant explains: Of all the glimpses of Eastern life the most interesting is the constantly recurring picture of the oriental story-teller. Everywhere in the bazaars, by the wayside, in palace gardens or fishermen's cottages, [as is the case with Byron‘s Fisherman] during the feasts or before the caliph's tribunal, by night and by day the teller of tales is sure of an interested audience. ... The chief appeal is to the listener's or reader's curiosity, and little thought is given to the structural unity of the narrative. …[and the] close of the average story is usually as movable a point as the climax.‖ (8–9)

The lines of Byron‘s Fisherman project a climax in the tale and foretell its dramatic and tragic end in a heroic style. The ―spark,‖ from Leila‘s eye is not a normal one; it has magical powers capable of piercing the eyes of the beholder, who would immediately be intoxicated by her beauty. On the other hand, it associates with the glimmer of a swift metal weapon topped with a sharp sparkling blade, probably that of an arrow. The term ―darted‖ refers to the swift speed of this arrow; and the ―lid‖ with its coiled figure seems to refer to its bow. Thus, when Leila‘s lid is open, it curves and beams forth this gleaming spark, which cuts deep into the hearts. Leila‘s eye becomes a goblet filled with sparkling wine which intoxicates and pleases to the point of ecstasy. Such is Byron‘s Oriental image of Eastern beauty, or perhaps of

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Greece‘s beauty, which exposes his masterful and aesthetic employment of Oriental culture. Byron‘s dependence on D‘Herbelot and other Eastern sources for information is therefore triggered by a deep and sincere interest in not only studying the culture of this region of the world but also in becoming one with it; i.e., to think and write like an Oriental writer or story-teller. Byron‘s use of the myth of Jamshid is therefore far more fetched and stretched than the ordinary use. In The Giaour, Byron employs traditional Eastern literary conventions upon which an Eastern tragic love tale would be based; however, he goes beyond his Western contemporaries in his aesthetic representations of the East by showing the difference between Orientalist scholars, such as William Beckford and Thomas Moore, and Orientalist participants. And indeed, I am exalted as an Eastern reader by Byron‘s ability to participate in Oriental life and colors and to render his Eastern references artistically condensed and smooth enough to satisfy an informed Western reader, such as Moore, or a even a Lebanese-American literary figure and philosopher, such as Amine Rihani who was Kahlil Gibran‘s friend and mentor and preserver of ―the Byron Marble,‖ which Rihani took from Byron‘s grave to decorate his desk. In this sense, D‘Herbelot and other Orientalists may have provided Byron with Eastern sources, but they could not have given him the artistic skill and craftsmanship to render Eastern elements in his tale function symbolically and thematically much as they do in Oriental poetry.

LORD BYRON AND AMEEN F. RIHANI In its most meaningful purposes, a quest for the formation of a universal self is a means to willingly go beyond preconceived notions, limited ideological and religious beliefs, and traditional social norms. Self-liberation and self-formation are subsequent and cannot be achieved unless the terrain of the Self goes beyond its regional and national disciplinary boundaries and their contextual confinements to interact, rather participate and fuse, with difference. Only then Self becomes free; it redeems itself and the world around it and becomes conditioned to control the roots of the powerful unconscious attachments to self-boundaries. Consequently, the most effective procedures for personal growth and creativity are provided. Modern psychoanalysts, like Stephen Mitchell, Robert Rogers and James Masterson,48 assert that in its most essential stages the process of self-formation entails inner and outer journeys made by Self in search for meaning, for certitude, and for higher values. The major risk taken by Self is facing the unknown, but this risk is itself a positive one because it is the basis of knowledge. When Self becomes familiar with the unknown, it gains knowledge and accepts difference. Self, then, triggers the process of genuine participation with Other, which ceases to be Other. In this respect, the Eastern Sufi thinkers, the first romantics ever, used this process to unite with Nature and God long before modern psychology became a science. The formation of a universal self, then, starts with selfliberation from narcissism and from the immediate boundaries of See Stephen Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Robert Rogers, Self and Other: Object Relations in Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1991); and James Masterson, The Real Self (New York: Mazel, 1985). 48

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the mind and soul. With literary thinkers, however, this process is manifested in two ways: in their personal travels and quests and in their literary pilgrimages. Both quests quite often aim at liberating Self from inner and outer tensions and conflicts, which hinder the acquisition of universal knowledge and which aim at enhancing the fusion of Self with Other. In this respect, Byron‘s and Rihani‘s perceptive growth and conditions of literary creativity are inter-related. Their personal travels and their creative travelogues—if Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Book of Khalid can be identified, amongst other genres, as travelogues—should not be taken only as representing physical pilgrimages in the outer world only but also as spiritual and intellectual pursuits for liberating and reshaping Self. In this work, I maintain that Lord Byron‘s and Ameen Rihani‘s literary formation of selves follows the above described process, which is Romantic in its demand for universalizing Self, for its distinctive rejection of orthodoxy and of narcissistic desires and purposes, and for its acceptance of and participation with difference in its search for meaning, certitude, and higher values. The Romantic pilgrimage, which M. H. Abrams refers to as the Romantic circuitous journey, in which ―man must break out of the cycle of his present existence into the enduring vision of an integral and entirely human world,‖ (195)49 seems to be the underlying purpose of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Book of Khalid. I also contend that Rihani‘s Khalid is a model Byronic hero. Like Childe Harold, Khalid sets out on a quest in pursuit of a universal identity; he is charged with a radical type of romanticism and wrapped with a desire to break away from the systems in order to revolt against the orthodoxy of a world of man-made conflicts and finally sparkles like a lonely star in his mysteriously powerful Byronic image as he faces his doom. Khalid ventures outside his own milieu to unravel the truth about the world around him, as a means of understanding and shaping Self. He takes Nature as his main companion and as a standard of judgment. Further, Khalid‘s pil49 For a full discussion of the Romantic circuitous journey, see Abrams, 141–324.

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grimage from the East to the West and back to the East parallels in many ways Childe Harold‘s pilgrimage from the West to the East and back to the West; both are typical romantic circuitous quests aimed at self-liberation and self-universalization. However in discussions exploring comparative studies and literary influences, a scholar must find a link, a nexus between the influence and the influenced. This nexus, direct or indirect, must promote focal points in the personal lives and/or the creative works of literary figures. In Rihani‘s case, the Byronic nexus is detected in both; however, it is most certainly reflected on the Byron Marble, which, I believe Rihani got hold of during a visit he made to Nottingham in 1912. In an unpublished manuscript, Rihani writes: ―I am in the midst of the Byron country now. …[where] the Muses seem to take care of the children‖ (―English Women,‖ 95). Rihani visited Newstead Abbey, Byron‘s estate, and Hucknall Church, where Byron‘s body rests. The Byron Marble, which Rihani was proud to keep in his office in Freike, and which is still there, becomes a powerful symbol for Rihani who writes in one of his metaphorically loaded letters: Are the tombs of friends and relatives more sacred than those of the poets? For me, the grave of Byron is a sacred spot. He taught me the science of sorting out flatterers and inquisitors. So I bury the letters of such people in a box on the left, and they die in it; and I place the letters of worthy people under the Marble [Byron‘s Marble], and they are revived! Such is one of the unique wonders of the Marble. Indeed, because of Byron I have become a man with dignity; I have become a disciple of God, who revives the dead. Praise the Lord, praise Byron and myself! (Rihani, Letters, 291)50

To Rihani, the Byron Marble is not a mere stone used to hold significant letters on his desk; it represents Rihani‘s sanctuary of all that is worth consideration and contemplation. Also, the reviving capability of Byron‘s Marble represents the resurgence of the Self‘s interaction with Other, since all letters not lying under the Marble 50 This friend is Fr. Elias El-Khoury, who once visited Rihani with Dr. Najib Mahfouz in Freike.

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are bound to dash this interaction. In its most symbolic representation, Byron‘s Marble is a nexus binding the soul of one great Western thinker to another Eastern one. Rihani‘s respect for and his keen knowledge of Byron, however, is further implied in Rihani‘s correspondence. In a letter, he writes to a friend and poetic critic: When Lord Byron wrote his epic poem, Don Juan, and sent it from Venice to his publisher in London, he received an answer from this publisher claiming that half of Don Juan is good poetry and the other half is not. Lord Byron wrote the publisher back saying that he was delighted at his judgment, because he never thought that his poem had so much good poetry. (Rihani, Letters, 338)

If the above quotation tells anything, it tells of Rihani‘s enormous knowledge of Byron‘s voluminous correspondence and works. In fact, [besides] in 1926, Rihani responded to a question about the writers and books which greatly influenced his youthful mind by mentioning first Shakespeare and second Lord Byron; afterwards he listed the names of authors like Hugo, Paine, Thoreau, Voltaire, Carlyle, Rousseau, Huxley, and others.51 And although Rihani does not disclose his reading of all of Byron‘s works, especially of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, it is wrong to assume that he did not read the work which made Byron famous overnight. This Byronic nexus in Rihani‘s literary career becomes quite tenacious when, in The Book of Khalid, Rihani makes a significant reference to Byron and De Musset as ―the inspiring geniuses‖ of one of the two rival wings and forces of the ―Modern School of Arabic Poetry,‖ science being the other motivating force (Khalid, 133–134). Indeed, Byron‘s revolution against the dominant social, political and cultural traditions was inspiring to modern poets around the world. Rihani acknowledges Byron‘s universal impact by extending it to the Arab world, as well. See Ameen Rihani, ―Books,‖ in Adab wa Fan (Beirut: Dar Rihani for Printing and Publishing, 1957): 48. Among other poets, Byron is considered by Rihani as being kissed and attended to by the gods; see for instance, 46. 51

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It is also worth mentioning that Rihani was very well acquainted with Byron‘s personal life. Rihani must have been fascinated by Byron‘s personal interest in extending the domain of his world beyond his native country. At an early age, Byron decided to break away from the enclosed and limited confines of his native land and Self and to traverse and participate with the world of difference, as a means of forming a universal self. ―—If we see no nation but our own,‖ Byron writes, ―we do not give mankind a fair chance, it is from experience not Books, we ought to judge of mankind.—There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our senses‖; ―I would become a citizen of the world‖ (BLJ, II, 173 and 247). Byron was aware that as much as on-the-spot knowledge of the world liberates Self, lack of knowledge encloses and inhibits it. Rihani, who was no different than Byron, writes in The Book of Khalid, ―I am a citizen of two worlds [the East and the West]—a citizen of the Universe‖ (237). And he writes to a friend: ―You must prepare yourself for the future by attending the universal college of the world‖ (Rihani, Letters, 49).52 In another letter he writes to a fellow scholar, ―Blessed is your exile, for it unlocked the truth of livingcreatures to you‖ (Rihani, Letters, 214). As mentioned above, by traversing the world of the other in actuality and/or in his imagination, a literary figure and thinker is capable of liberating himself from inner and outer agonies, which confine his soul and mind; only then does he become obsessed with the mission of liberating others. Byron makes this clear when he asserts: ―Who would be free themselves must strike the blow‖ (CPW, II, Childe, II, Stz. lxxvi). In Byron‘s attempt to universalize his knowledge and to advance the causes of freedom and democracy in the world, he left his native British island twice during his life. The first time in 1809 for a period of two years, during which he lived with the Easterners of Albania, Turkey, and Greece, to return back to England with a mature and free self capable of breaking the chains of native traditions and oppression. The second time was in 1816, when he left his homeland never to return, for he died in Messolonghi, Greece, in 1824, fighting for the liberation of the Greeks from Ottoman oppression. After his death, Byron became 52

The translation of the Arabic letters is mine.

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a model of the universal revolutionary spirit. Such a literary personality would, indeed, attract the attention of Rihani and stimulate his passions for freedom and liberation from a common oppressor. And, like Byron, Rihani asserts, ―The soul must be free, and the mind, before one has the right to be a member of a free Government, before one can justly enjoy his rights and perform his duties as a subject‖ (Khalid, 290). Rihani‘s and Byron‘s eagerness to embrace all that is without their worlds and to become one with difference is, then, an attempt to ―tame the chaos,‖ to use Coleridge‘s phrase, in their selves and to achieve fresh perspectives of the world and the Self. Towards this end, they utilize their personal travels. And in much the same manner, both Byron and Rihani distance their creative characters from their native selves, since ―Poetry, as a foray out of the self and into the world, ‗brackets‘ that world, relocates its horizons of meaning, and temporarily liberates the poet‖ (Snyder, 34). Both literary figures physically distance their poetic characters from their own societies. Both, Childe Harold and Khalid, are sickened by the limited and enclosed traditions of their native lands, so they decide to break the chains of these confinements. Harold leaves Albion‘s Isle for the East: And now Childe Harold was more sick at heart, And from his fellow bacchanals would flee; … And from his native land resolved to go, And visit scorching climes beyond the sea; With pleasure drugg‘d, he almost long‘d for woe, And e‘en for change of scene would seek the shades below. (CPW, III, Childe, I, vi)

Khalid, on the other hand, leaves Baalbek for the Far West, for America: Khalid will seek the shore and launch into unknown seas towards unknown lands. From the City of Baal to the City of Demiurgic Dollar is not in fact a far cry. It has been remarked that he always dreamt of adventures, of long journeys across the desert or across the sea. He never was satisfied with the seen horizon, we are told, no matter how vast and beautiful. His soul always yearned for what was beyond, above or below, the visible line. (Khalid, 23–24)

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This ―sick[ness] at heart‖ to leave familiarity with the thirst for going ―beyond, above or below,‖ the traditional horizons, for both Childe Harold and for Khalid, is an eagerness to accept all the risks involved in facing the unknown (the beyond) and the mysterious (the below). Risk taking, one must confess, is indicative of a spirit endowed with the willingness to change, to learn, and to become different. This willingness, however, remains egocentric and fruitless unless nourished with pure Love, which is the only agent capable of diffusing all in one. Julia Kristeva explains, ―in the rapture of love, the limits of one‘s identity vanish‖ (2). To Byron and the romantics, as well as to Dante, Love was the route by which the time-bound individual might learn a vision of ultimate truth, a glimpse of that world which stands behind [beyond] or above our meager existences. Hence love was a state of being that was eagerly to be coveted, not for purposes of physical satisfaction, but rather because the attraction of one soul for another was a guarantee that the entire universe was permeated with similar energy and spirit. (Hugo, 8–9)

Love then is associated with knowledge. Wordsworth makes it clear in his celebrated ―Preface‖ that poetry, considered by the romantics to be the warehouse of knowledge, ―is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love‖ (English Romantic Writers, 325). The Romantics believed that the medium for the search for Truth is Love; they would strongly agree with Roland Barthes‘s claim that ―Love‖ opens the eyes wide and that it ―produces clear-sightedness‖ (Barthes, 229). Shelley confirms in his ―Defense of Poetry‖ that ―The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own‖ (English Romantic Writers, 1076). Thus, love leads to knowledge of difference. And concurrently knowledge of difference universalizes Self. Childe Harold‘s and Khalid‘s laborious quests for universal identities are, then, quests for universal love, itself leading to knowledge of the other: of Man, of the World, and of God. Byron‘s ultimate willingness to become one with difference, with Nature, is made clear in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in the following Stanza.:

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky—the peak—the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle—and not in vain. (CPW, II, Childe, III, Stz. Lxxii)

To Byron and to most romantics, Nature becomes a superior other, a terrain of the ultimate freedom and liberty of the soul from the ―fleshy chain,‖ and the agent capable of freeing the soul through its union with Nature is Love. This idea reverberates in the following lines: Are not the mountains, waves and skies a part Of me and of my soul, as I of them? Is not the love of these deep in my heart With a pure passion? (CPW, II, Childe, III, Stz. lxxv)

Rihani links to Byron and the romantics in that he dedicates the three books of The Book of Khalid: to Man, to Nature, and to God, all three entities lying outside the terrain of Self, and all redeemed by man via Love. In ―Book the First,‖ Khalid confirms his Godwinian belief in the ultimate liberation of man from his selfcenteredness via Love; he asserts that No matter how good thou art, O my Brother, or how bad thou art, no matter how high or how low in the scale of being thou art, I still would believe in thee, and have faith in thee, and love thee. (Khalid, 5)

Love, then, frees Khalid from the anxiety of revulsion and narcissism; it offers him limitless possibilities to participate with the Other. Khalid confirms the above by saying: ―Everything in life must always resolve itself into love. … Love is the divine solvent, Love is the splendor of God‖ (Khalid, 295). In ―Book the Second,‖ Khalid reaffirms his belief in the divine wisdom of Nature and in the illuminating power of Love, and he indirectly alludes to all five British romantic poets when he writes in his remarkably poetic dedication to Nature:

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O Mother eternal, … I come to thee, I prostrate my face before thee, I surrender myself wholly to thee. O touch me with thy wand divine again; stir me once more in thy mysterious alembics; remark me to suit the majestic silence of thy hills, the supernal purity of thy sky, the mystic austerity of thy groves, the modesty of thy slow-swelling, soft-rolling streams, the imperious pride of thy pines, the wild beauty and constancy of thy mountain rivulets [These lines echo Wordsworth and Coleridge]. Take me in thine arms, and whisper to me thy secrets; fill my senses with thy breath divine; show me the bottom of thy terrible spirit [Byron]; buffet me in thy storms, infusing in me of thy ruggedness and strength, thy power and grandeur [Shelley]; lull me in thine autumn sun-downs to teach me in the arts that enrapture, exalt, supernaturalize [Keats]. … Anoint me with the chrism of spontaneity that I may be ever worthy of thee.— Withdraw not from me thy hand, lest universal love and sympathy die in my breast [Wordsworth and Coleridge]. (Khalid, 97–98)

Nature, then, offers man the opportunity of immediate experience to communicate with divinity and provides him with a direct access to the beyond and above. Nature represents this outside other that is imbued with significance beyond itself; it represents God, who, according to Khalid‘s Hermit, ―is the only reality‖ ―for Man is supreme, only when he is the proper exponent of Nature, and spirit, and God‖ (Khalid, 226 and 242). To Khalid the real Temple of God lies in the ―Cellar of the Soul,‖ which taught him that only through the love of the divine in Man, in the self, and in the other ―that we rise to the love of our Maker‖ (Khalid, 56). Khalid‘s Divine Temple is made of pine trees for ―The first church was the forest; the first dome, the welkin; the first altar, the sun‖ (Khalid, 162). Nature not only represents God‘s Temple but it also speaks the glory and grace of God and embodies His Spirit. This pantheistic concept of God reverberates all through Byron‘s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. For instance, Byron addresses the stars as the poetry of heaven; they implant in our souls the seeds of love and reveal the divine truth, which ―through our being then melts‖ ―in a life intense‖ to produce an eternal harmony amongst all (CPW, Childe, III, Stzs. lxxxviii–xc). Rihani‘s Khalid, on the other hand, writes that stars ―are the embers of certainty eternally glowing in

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the ashes of doubt‖ (Khalid, 234). Byron further reveals these strikingly similar pantheistic conceptions in the following Stanza.: Not vainly did the early Persian make His altar the high places, and the peak Of earth-o‘ergazing mountains, and thus take A fit and unwall‘d temple, there to seek The Spirit, in whose honour shrines are weak, Uprear‘d of human hands. Come, and compare Columns and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek, With Nature‘s realms of worship, earth and air, Nor fix on fond abodes to circumscribe thy pray‘r! (CPW, II, Childe, III, Stz. xci)

But both Childe Harold and Khalid must suffer before they can approach self-liberation. They must purify their souls by distancing themselves from all that stains their souls with selfishness and narcissism. To do this, they must seek seclusion to contemplate the purity, primitiveness, and beauty of the other. Their contemplation would nourish their souls with pure and genuine love; consequently, they would become more primed to mingle with the universe. This process starts with pain caused by separation and ends with joy activated by reconciliation. Charged with a universal identity, Khalid, like Childe Harold, breaks the chains of orthodoxy when he revolts ―against the ruling spirit of his people and the dominant tendencies of the times, both in his native and his adopted countries‖ (Khalid, 131). He must become an exile and suffer the consequences of his revolution against and rejection of native tradition. In this sense, Khalid becomes a model of the Byronic Hero, who amongst Romantic heroes, is perhaps the most revolutionary universal figure. His self-exiled character provokes him to revolt against all religious, social, and political traditions. He abandons materialistic assets and social ties, and like a roaming dervish, he [Khalid] traverses the outer world of difference to end up in the sanctuary of Nature, where he isolates himself to delve deep into his inner self to tame his anger and to nourish and revive the freedom of his soul. As such, I strongly believe that the description of the Byronic Hero in the quotation below best describes Khalid.

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[A] moody, passionate, and remorse-torn but unrepentant wanderer. In his developed form, as we find it in Manfred, he is an alien, mysterious, and gloomy spirit, immensely superior in his passions and powers to the common run of humanity, whom he regards with disdain. He harbors the torturing memory of an enormous, nameless guilt that drives him toward an inevitable doom. He is in his isolation absolutely self-reliant, inflexibly pursuing his own ends according to his selfgenerated moral code against any opposition, human or supernatural. And he exerts an attraction on other characters that is the more compelling because it involves their terror at his obliviousness to ordinary human concerns and values. … Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, gives a chapter to Byron not because he was a systematic thinker but because "Byronism," the attitude of "Titanic cosmic self-assertion," established an outlook and a stance toward humanity and the world that entered nineteenth century philosophy and eventually helped to form Nietzsche's concept of the Superman, the hero who stands outside the jurisdiction of the ordinary criteria of good and evil.53

Taking the above into consideration, a study of Khalid‘s character and actions would project a typical representation of the Byronic Hero. Khalid‘s contempt of his native social traditions renders him a moody and ―remorse-torn‖ wanderer, who leaves his homeland carrying with him the torturing memories of his thwarted love. His gloomy spirit pushes him deep into the ―Cellar of the Soul,‖ which renders him a tramp wrapped with his own distinctive moral codes. He then burns his peddling-box to become a dervish, a wanderer ―who now wears his hair long and grows his finger nails like a Brahmin,‖ (Khalid, 85) and who seeks the knowledge of the beyond and below in isolation. He sleeps under the stars in the Bronx Park, which awakens in him his love for Nature. He returns to civilization to revolt against the Cash Register, ―the altar 53 See The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. Sixth edition, Vol. II (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993): 480.

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of every institution, political, moral, social, and religious.‖ (Khalid, 130) He comes back to his homeland to revolt against all native institutions and to banish himself to the pine hills of his native land, where he builds his temple. Thus, Nature anoints his free spirit and liberates his soul, which marches ―On the high road of the universal spirit, … chanting of freedom, faith, hope, health and power, and joy‖ (Khalid, 245). When he leaves his temple to lecture against the tyranny and hypocrisy of social, religious and political institutions, he is driven toward his inevitable doom in the midst of the desert. As thus, Khalid‘s character ties very well to the universal Byronic hero. What links Rihani to Byron, then, are more than a simple marble and a few expressions. Rihani must have been fascinated with the universality of Byron and Byronism when he wrote The Book of Khalid. Like Byron, Rihani acknowledges quest as a means of disclosing Self and universalizing it. He lived a life of constant mobility, and he was fitted up with a free universal identity and adorned with the self of a free agent, both of which were capable of defying or assimilating cultural restraints and traditions. In this respect, his and, more obviously, his creative characters‘ searches for standards of appraisal in the West and in the East represent Byronic self-inflicted attempts to establish a hold on the world.

CONCLUSION: LORD BYRON’S UNIVERSALITY ―In the history of human genius, its powers, and its weakness, there never was a man whose abilities and conduct excited more ardent attention, and afforded more of real and speculative topic for praise and defamation, than Lord Byron.‖ (Morning Chronicle, July 30th, 1824)54

The moral responsibility for Self-localization, for the Romantics, becomes an integral part of a process entailing physical and/or visionary quests beyond the restricted boundaries of known variables in search for universal values. Self acquires knowledge through perceptions of the lesser known variables and through examining their relationships to the better known ones. The ―creation of meaning of the Other, and thus also of myself, that my freedom, my ethical freedom, comes to be," says Z. Bauman (86); Self is constituted through its interaction with Other, which then becomes a necessary object of study. The Romantics knew this well enough to seek this Other in the primitive, common, and natural and in the distant and mysterious. They contemplated this Other and universalized their experiences in works carrying glimmering sparks of ―Universal Truths.‖ However, contemplations and reflections without a determination for practical and rational actions are not enough to enable location of Self and Other and consequently freedom. Referring to Hegel, Richard Eldridge confirms:

See ―Character of Lord Byron,‖ in Byron Painted by his Compeers (London: Samuel Palmer, 1869): 5; an anonymous writer wrote the article about three months and a half after Byron‘s Death in Messolonghi on April, 18, 1824. The book includes selections of the articles about Lord Byron written by contemporary journal editors. 54

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD The mere determination to act, not wait, is enough to enable freedom, self-knowledge, and self-realization. Alone, such determination remains a sign of distress. One must concretely find one‘s way out of absorption in subjective experience and to actual knowledge and rational and expressive action. How can this move be made? Only through the experience of an other. (119)

When Lord Byron is taken into account, the moral responsibility to locate and liberate Self becomes both practical and metaphoric; it becomes an urge to go beyond the restrictive boundaries of Self in search of its locality with respect to the distant Other. If moral responsibility, as Galen Strawson explains, is ―a function of one's height, one's strength, one's place and time,‖ (6), then one cannot ignore the fact that Byron was more aware of his height, his strength, his place, and his time than other Romantic figures. So to answer the question: ―Was Byron a morally responsible person and poet?‖ is to explore Byron‘s height and strength in the universe and to go beyond the particular scandalous, private affairs, which were severely scrutinized by his contemporary critics. Besides, the answer to the above question seems to violate the self-conscious and passionate individualism the man, the poet, and the concept have come to signify, but there can be no universally applicable perception of moral responsibility, particularly Romantic moral responsibility, anymore than there can be a comprehensive understanding of Lord Byron or any other Romantic figure. Perhaps no protean concept can ever be fully explicit, anymore than there can be an unquestionable understanding of any one literary figure. This, however, may be the essence of the Romantic canon; i.e., to resist clear-cut perceptions and identifications. In this sense, the discourse of Byron‘s moral responsibility cannot be conclusive nor can it be studied in isolation from his universal public‘s reactions, his artistic expressions, and his self-identification with Other. In this work, I investigate Byron‘s moral responsibility, as poet and man, at particular times and places, and contend that his travels to the East enhanced his sense of universal moral values. I refer to Kant‘s perception of freedom and moral responsibility and relate it to Byron; then, I briefly expose Byron‘s use of satire as a moral responsibility to tell the truth about Self and Other. Finally, I discuss the influence of his Eastern tours on fostering his universal moral values.

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In his ―Byron and Morals,‖ George Rebec claims: ―In discussing, … the morals of Byron and his poetry, it is not necessary to follow in the tracks of the Caroline Lambs, the Beecher-Stowes, and the proper public generally in onslaught, nor of the Moores, the Austins, or even the Castelars at defence, but [it] is possible to raise the subject onto more universal grounds, and to look to its more universal interest‖ (39). He clarifies: I have no purpose—though something of this is being done these very days more effectively than ever—of trying, by further bringing forward of evidence or by elucidations of fated temperament and circumstance, to extenuate Byron's indisputable deep taint of egoism, affectation, vulgarity, violence, and sensual looseness. Much less is it my object to endeavor to get around Byron's sceptical defiance and revolutionary radicalism. And yet, paradoxically, the aim here is to maintain that the essential, final influence of Byron is a powerfully moral one, [giving Byron] springing from soundness of ethical content, and therefore in its very nature abiding, and justifying the expectation for Byron of a lasting place in the history of European literature and the evolution of the higher life of the Western peoples. (30–40)

I support Rebec‘s claim and argue further that Byron‘s personal affairs at certain stages of his life, immoral and irresponsible as they were in England, the Continent, and even in the Orient, were, to a certain extent, universal human variables upon which he rooted his perceptions of Man‘s goods and ills, including his own. In a footnote in his The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes clear the connection between the moral law and freedom. He clarifies that freedom is the essence of morality and that morality is a rational state embracing freedom: To avoid having anyone imagine that there is an inconsistency when I say that freedom is the condition of the moral law, and later assert that the moral law is the condition under which freedom can be known, I will only remind the reader that, though freedom is certainly the ratio essendi of the moral law, the latter is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom. For had not the moral law already been distinctly thought in our reason, we would never have been justified in assuming anything like

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So moral responsibility and freedom are essential in rendering man‘s life meaningful and worthwhile; here the mind and the soul work in full concurrence to validate the meaning and worth of life. He further explains the ―ratio cognoscendi of freedom‖ as a ―stumbling block of all empiricists but the key to the most sublime practical principles for critical moralists, who see, through it, that they must necessarily proceed rationally‖ (Trans. Beck, 8). In simpler words, liberation of Self cannot be achieved via visions and dreams only, as Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge thought, but through objective rationalization of realities, positive and/or negative realities, as Byron, Shelley, and Keats did. However, among the last three Romantic poets, Byron was the most realistic and practical in his search for freedom and moral values. Byron also satisfies Kant‘s basic conditions for morality, which is determined by willed responses and by inner urges to feel Self‘s and Other‘s grounds of existence at particular places and times.55 For Byron, locating personhood and its space in the universe may be achieved through actions which would entail Other and this Other‘s moral grounds, as well. In a letter to Thomas Moore (November 5, 1820), Byron clarifies the grounds upon which his freedom and real existence rest: When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home, Let him combat for that of his neighbors;

55 In his The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant writes: ―In the question of freedom which lies at the foundation of all moral laws and accountability to them, it is really not at all a question of whether the causality determined by a natural law is necessary through determining grounds lying within or without the subject, or whether, if they lie within him, they are in instinct or in grounds of determination thought by reason. If these determining conceptions themselves have the ground of their existence in time and, more particularly, in the antecedent state and these again in preceding state, and so on (as those men themselves admit)‖; see Translation by Beck, 99-100.

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Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome, And get knocked on his head for his labors. To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan, And is always as nobly requited; Then battle for freedom wherever you can, And, if not shot or hanged, you‘ll get knighted. (Prothero, BL&J, V, 111–112)

Byron lived most of his life in distress until he located his own space and that of Other while seeking freedom not only in his native land but also in Italy and Greece. And he was ready to bleed to death to deliver Other from tyranny and oppression. By actually doing this, he was not ―knocked on his labor‖ nor was he ―shot or hanged,‖ or even ―knighted‖; instead, he became a martyr of freedom, in his homeland, in Greece, and in the world. So much has been said about Byron‘s satire, all the reason why I limit my discussion to its relation to morality. In the last stanzas of Canto I, of Don Juan, Byron employs humor and irony to discuss the morality of his narrative poem: If any person should presume to assert This story is not moral, first, I pray, That they will not cry out before they're hurt, Then that they'll read it o'er again, and say (But, doubtless, nobody will be so pert) That this is not a moral tale, though gay; Besides, in Canto Twelfth, I mean to show The very place where wicked people go. … The public approbation I expect, And beg they'll take my word about the moral, Which I with their amusement will connect (So children cutting teeth receive a coral); Meantime, they'll doubtless please to recollect My epical pretensions to the laurel: For fear some prudish readers should grow skittish, I've bribed my grandmother's review—the British. (CPW, V, Stzs., 207 and 209)

In the second Stanza of Canto V, Byron mocks amorous poets and ends his Stanza.: ―Now, if my Pegasus should not be shod ill,/This poem will become a moral model.‖ He then directs his satire in Canto VI, towards his readers who ―have the gift/Of

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closing ‗gainst the light their orb of vision‖ (Stz. 88). Finally he mocks himself in Canto XII: Oh, pardon my digression—or at least Peruse! 'T is always with a moral end That I dissert, like Grace before a feast: For like an aged aunt, or tiresome friend, A rigid guardian, or a zealous priest, My Muse by exhortation means to mend All people, at all times, and in most places, Which puts my Pegasus to these grave paces. (CPW, V, Don Juan, Stz., 39)

The above stanzas are loaded with what Juvenal, Pope and Swift would consider a moral responsibility to tell the truth about Other and even Self. Byron satisfies his own moral responsibility by mockingly exposing his own ills and those of others including his readers, although later he asserts the moral of his poem in a letter to John Murray (February 1, 1891): If they had told me the poetry was bad, I would have acquiesced; but they say the contrary, and then talk to me about morality—the the first time I ever heard the word from any body who was not a rascal that used it for a purpose. I maintain that it is the most moral of poems; but if people won‘t discover the moral that is their fault not mine‖ (Prothero, BL&J, IV, 279)

Byron‘s satire in Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Vision of Judgment, English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, the Oriental tales and several other works, all of which are written after his Eastern tours, encompasses social, religious, economic, political, and cultural ills and vices of Western and Eastern men alike. In his English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, he strikes at his own countrymen: ―Fools are my theme, let satire be my song,‖ (CPW, I, l. 6); so he satirizes Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Scott, among several other literary figures. Then, he mockingly confesses: ―E‘en I—least thinking of a thoughtless throng,/Just skill‘d to know the right and choose the wrong,‖ (ll. 689–690). Byron knows himself enough to tell Lady Blessington ―—I am such a strange mélange of good and evil, that it would be difficult to describe me‖ (Lovell, 220). In most world confessions, confession is a virtue, and incompleteness is only hu-

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man and at the heart of the redemptive process. Incompleteness, then, may produce a sense of moral responsibility if acknowledged. Byron‘s acknowledgment of his incompleteness must have fostered his responsibility to act to free himself and others from vices. J. Drummond Bone sums up Byron‘s perception of freedom: ―In practical matters his [Byron‘s] conception of freedom was most often negatively defined—it was freedom from political, social or economic oppression, freedom from convention, freedom from hypocrisy, cant, [and] humbug‖ (166). In his travelogues and Oriental tales, Byron attacks the oppressive and hypocritical behavior of Eastern and Continental peoples and rulers such as Napoleon, the Russian and the Ottoman rulers. To give textual support of the above is to replicate what several Byron scholars have already exhausted in various seminal works. The telling point here is that Byron‘s moral responsibility as satirist before his first Eastern tour was quite limited to native critics of his early works, but then after his experiences in the Continent and the East it became universal and inclusive. Byron‘s interest at the beginning of his literary career in an Eastern tour translates his personal eagerness to extend his mental horizons beyond locality. ―The young writer on the threshold of his career, enabled by absence from England and exposure to foreign culture to take a fresh look at his original environment, feels the need to analyze society and his relationship to it,‖ says W. Ruddick (119). Indeed, Byron would not have had a sense of personal and poetic wholeness had he not toured the Continent and the East twice in his lifetime. He confesses in one of his letters: ―—If we see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance; it is from experience not books,—we ought to judge of mankind.—There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses‖ (BLJ, I, 172). After he travelled to the East, he writes to Robert Charles Dallas, from Constantinople: ―I would be a citizen of the world,‖ (BLJ, I, 248); and indeed a citizen of the world, he became. In another letter he writes: ―With those countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end‖ (BLJ, V, 45). These statements constitute the crux upon which his moral responsibility, as a person and literary figure, rests. His eagerness to become one with difference, with the East, is an attempt to ―tame the chaos,‖ in his self. ―Towards this end,‖ Robert Lance Snyder says, ―Byron utilizes the travelogue genre [in

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Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan] to distance himself from the phantasmagoria of the ‗world‘ and achieve a fresh perceptive on himself‖ (26). I have written above that: Byron‘s personal and literary writing attest the fact that the East represented to him a world where his spirit and intellect were free to roam beyond, and even soar high above, the complexities and confines of his Western Self. The East gave Byron a sense of real existence and the opportunity he awaited to set his personal and poetic passions free. It gave him the opportunity to escape from the boredom and cant of Regency society and to reconstruct his position as a representative of the radical rebel protesting against hypocrisy and tyranny. (10– 11)

As mentioned before, to Byron liberation is not completely achieved via metaphoric expressions but through actions involving first-hand interaction with an Other. His rebellion against tyranny drove him into action when in 1816, he left England for the second time to the Continent and then to Greece. In Italy, he joined the revolutionary societies of the Romagna and the Carbonari leaders and placed himself under fatal dangers, but their lack of organization and unity turned his eyes towards Greece, where he later died seeking the liberation of the Greeks from Ottoman oppression. His spirit awoke to the sound of the banners of freedom when he set foot on Greek soil in August, 1823. He met with the ―Washington‖ of Greece, Prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, leader of the revolutionaries, then sailed to Messolonghi and supported the forces there with weapons and money. On the evening of his thirty-sixth birthday, on January 22nd, 1824, he expressed his willingness to give his life for the cause of freedom in a poem, ―On this Day I Complete My Thirty-Six Year‖: Awake! (not Greece—she is awake!) Awake, my spirit! Think through whom Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake, And then strike home! … If thou regret‘st thy youth, why live? The land of honourable death Is here:—up to the field, and give

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Away thy breath! Seek out—less often sought than found— A soldier‘s grave, for thee the best; Then look around, and choose thy ground, And take thy rest. (CPW, VII, 80–81)

Before the above poem, Byron had written in Don Juan III: I dream‘d that Greece might still be free; For standing on the Persian‘s grave, I could not deem myself a slave. (CPW, V, Stz., 189)

His dream implies, if anything, that Byron‘s sense of the Selffreedom concurs with the freedom of Other. To fulfill his dream, he sold his Newstead Abbey to finance the Greek revolutionaries and to join arms with them, but unfortunately he died of illness before he witnessed the liberation of Greece. The pursuit after a moral responsibility may rarely strike a young British lord to leave his estates or even sell them to aid others liberate themselves from oppression, but not our Lord. His death, however, aroused the passions for freedom of thousands of people around the world and in his own country. Here, it seems fair to ask whether Byron was equally interested in the liberation of his own countrymen from economic and political oppression. Although he frequently expressed his eagerness to set himself free from his native milieu,56 he was an ardent promoter of liberty and equality in England. His maiden address in the British House of Lords on the ―Nottingham Frame Bill‖ exposed him as a political and humanitarian reformer when he severely criticized the bill for its unfairness and ills. Although he received many compliments from the opposition, he refused to stand on the same stage again and told Augusta Leigh: ―I hate the thing altogether—& have no intention to ‗strut another hour‘ on that stage‖ (BLJ, III, 32). But, he chose another stage, that of poetry 56

See BLJ, 1973, I, 123, 149, 151, 173, 175, 197, 202–206, and 221.

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which he adorned with the authenticity of poetic expressions relating real life experiences, including its virtues and vices, to aesthetics. Rima D. Reck asserts that, "the authenticity of a writer's expression… and his response to the world in which he lives" translates a moral responsibility (xii). Among the British literary figures, Lord Byron was perhaps the most responsive practically and aesthetically to the worlds in which he lived. Stefan Treugutt refers to a contemporary of Byron, a Polish poet whose name is Adam Mickiewicz, who finds common aesthetic elements between Shakespeare and Byron; Treugutt writes: ―Both writers told him [Mickiewicz] truth about the nature of man, but of the two Byron stood for unrestrained individualism, for revolt, for cult of genius and worship of freedom‖ (132). To date, neither Romanticism nor Byron has died, and they retain the capacity to illuminate each other. Byron felt his whole existence rested upon a duty to counter oppression and advance collective and individual freedom in the world by using his capacity as man and as poet. In the process, he became one with the universe. Whether he did this to escape or redeem his scandalous affairs matters no more when he ordained himself to a moral cause such as freedom, which made life to be worth living and death to be worth dying.

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INDEX Abrams, M.H., 9, 97, 98, 134, 143, 155 Abul ‗Ala, xiii, 100, 101 Al Ghazzali, 100 Al-Hejazi, Ali Ahmad, 88, 92, 155 Ali Pacha, 23, 36, 81, 82 Arabian Nights, 45, 86, 125 Arac, Jonathan, 159 Arberry, A. J., 1, 73, 88, 155 Aristophanes, 117, 124 Aristotle, 159 Bacchus, 39 Banks, William, 13 Barthes, Roland, 139, 155, 158 Bauman, Z, 145, 155 Bayle, Pierre, 126 Beatty, Bernard, 99, 123, 156, 160 Beaujour, Félix de, 126 Beck, Lewis White, 148, 158 Beckford, William, 46, 68, 131 Behdad, Ali, 1 Berman, Paul, x Blackstone, Bernard, 1, 5, 85, 91, 93, 99, 106, 155 Blake, William, xiii, 97, 111, 148 Blessington, Lady Marguerite, 93, 106, 150 Bold, Alan, 155

Bone, Drummond J., 18, 19, 151, 155 Boulton, J.T., 156 Browne, William, 32 Burckhardt, John, 32, 33, 37–41, 155 Burke, Edmund, 56, 107, 108, 156 Burton, Arthur, 66, 157 Butler, Marilyn, 1, 99, 156 Butler,Marilyn, 123 Byron, Lord George Gordon, i, vii, ix–xiv, xvii, xix, 1–7, 9– 29, 31–75, 77–80, 82–108, 110–115, 117–131, 133–64 Cain: A Mystery, 61 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, x, xiii, xix, 2, 6, 15, 17, 19, 21, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 42, 72, 101, 111, 134–138, 140–142, 150, 152, 160, 163 Don Juan, xiii, 2, 5, 6, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, 36, 42, 63, 77, 104, 107, 111, 117, 122–124, 136, 149, 150, 152, 153, 161, 162, 164 English Bards and Scottish Reviewers, 19, 150 Heaven and Earth, 61

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Lara, 5, 107, 123 Manfred, 61, 111, 143 Marino Faliero: An Historical Tradedy, 5 Mazeppa, 5, 107 Sardanapalus: A Tragedy 5, 27, 40, 107, 111 The Bride of Abydos, vii, xiii, xix, 4, 5, 16, 17, 29, 40, 50, 52, 72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90–95, 105–107, 118–121 The Corsair, xix, 5, 17, 19, 27, 29, 49, 50, 53, 73, 76, 77, 81–83, 107, 121–123 The Curse of Minerva, 27 The Deformed Transformed, 27 The Giaour, vii, xii, xiii, xix, 4, 6, 19, 25, 50, 55–57, 62– 70, 72–74, 78, 79, 104, 105, 107, 112, 113, 115, 120, 125, 126, 129, 131, 156, 159, 163 The Island, 27 The Prisoner of Chillon, 5, 107 The Prophecy of Dante, 27 The Siege of Corinth, xix, 50, 73, 122 The Vision of Judgment, 150 Carlyle, Thomas, 136 Carvin, Harry R., 163 Castellan, A. L, 32, 126 Chandler, Richard, 32 Chardin, Jean, 126 Chaworth, Mary, 118, 119 Chew, Samuel, 1 Chinoy, Sajjid Zahir, 69 Christensen, Jerome, 66, 67, 124, 156

Christianity, vii, ix, 10, 36, 47, 55–57, 59–61, 67–69, 78, 82, 164 Clarke, Dr. E.D., 32, 93 Clayton, Sir Richard, 32 Clinton, Bill, ix Cochran, Peter, 2, 36, 125, 156 Coleridge, E.H., 53, 78, 127, 156 Coleridge, Samuel, 88, 98, 111, 138, 141, 148, 150 Conant, Martha Pike, 1, 46, 130 Coote, Stephen, 10, 26, 156 Croix, Petite De La, 126 Crowther, Paul, 108 Curtius, Quintus, 32 D‘Herbelot, Barthelamy, vii, 4, 6, 32, 89, 90, 125–129, 131, 157 D‘Ohsson, Mouradja, 32, 126 Dahalstrom, Daniel O., 163 Dallas, Robert Charles, 15, 23, 151 Daniel, Norman, 1, 32, 164 Dante, 6, 40, 99, 115, 139 De Boer, T.J., 100, 157 De Bolla, Peter, 108 De Musset, Alfred, 136 Delacroix, Eugene, vii, 5, 6, 55, 56, 62, 68, 84, 107, 108–161, 163, 164 Desai, Anita, 160 Dionysus, 3, 21 Dorsch, T.S., 159 Dowson, Ernest, 64, 161 Drinkwater, John, 9, 86, 157 Drury, Henry, 25 Duff, Mary, 118, 119 Edleston, John, 16, 119 Ekenhead, Lieutenant, 25

INDEX Eldridge, Richard, 12, 145, 157 El-Khoury, Fr. Elias, 135 Emir Beshir, x, 34, 35, 36, 38, 42 Eton, William, 32 Eugene, Prince, 126 Exoticism, xi, 3, 4, 45–50, 53, 54, 109, 110 Faber, George Stanley, 32 Fakhreddine II, 37 Firdausi, ix, 5, 75, 79, 86, 91, 128, 129, 157 Fletcher, William, 23, 24, 58 Forer, Bertram R., 66, 157 Frankline, Caroline, 63, 123, 157 Futilitarianism, xii, 56 Galdwin, Francis, 91 Galt, John, 54, 57, 58, 72, 85, 86, 103, 119, 157 Gamba, Count, 71, 125 Gifford, William, 106 Goldsmith, Oliver, 46 Goodreau, John R., 108 Greene, Thomas, 48 Griffith, T.E., 106 Gross, Jonathan, xiv, xvii, 117, 124, 156 Guerlac, Suzanne, 108 Hafiz, 5, 86, 91, 129 Hall, Jean, 16, 157 Hanson, John, 14, 15 Hardy, Lady, 118 Harington, John Herbert, 91 Harris, Eileen, 108 Hazlitt, William, 15, 157 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich, 97, 145 Hellenism, 22 Hilal, Mohammed G., 90, 92, 105, 158

169 Hill, Aron, 32 Hinderer, Walter, 163 Hinnant, Charles H., 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 158 Hipple, W.J., 108 Hobhouse, John Cam, x, 23, 25, 31, 33, 36, 37, 72, 76, 77, 81– 83, 158 Hodgson, Francis, 14, 16, 17, 24, 25, 58, 61, 118 Hoeveler, Diane Long, xvii Hofkson, Sonia, 123 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 22 Holland, Lord Henry, 72, 85, 119 Hooke, Nathaniel, 32 Hope, Thomas, 32 Horace, 47, 159 Howard, Richard, 155 Hugo, Howard, 158 Hugo, Victor, 136 Huntington, Samuel, ix, xii, 4, 61, 158 Huxley, Aldous, 136 Ibn l‘Arabi, xiii, 100 Islam, vii, ix, xii, 10, 47, 55–61, 67–82, 99, 100, 155, 157, 160, 163, 164 Jack, Malcolm, 160 Jami, 4, 75, 87, 89, 93, 94, 105, 106 Johnson, Samuel, 46 Jones, Edward R., 100, 157 Jones, Sir William, 73, 75, 88, 89, 91, 125, 129, 156 Journandes, 126 Judaism, ix, 47, 59 Jump, John, 162 Juvenal, 150

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LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD

Kant, Immanuel, 7, 107, 108, 146, 147, 148, 158 Keane, Robert N., 123, 162 Keats, John, 22, 97, 141, 148, 157 Kelsall, Malcolm, 123 Kidwai, Abdur Raheem, xii, 1, 2, 57, 99, 158 Knight, Diana, 63, 158 Kohut, Heinz, 13 Kristeva, Julia, 34, 139, 158 Kritzeck, James, 104, 106, 121, 158 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 37, 43 Lamb, Lady Caroline, 118, 147 Leask, Nigel, xi, 1, 51, 52, 53, 99, 158 Leslie, Doris, 158 Levinas, Emmanuel, 109 Levine, Alice, 123, 124, 162 Lewis, Reina, 1, 155 Long, Edward Noel, xvii, 13 Longinus, 107, 108, 159 Lovell, Ernest J. Jr., 150, 159 Lowe, Lisa, 1, 46, 99, 159 Lucas, Stephan, 69, 159 MacKenzie, John, xi, 1, 48, 51, 99, 159 Macri, Mrs. Tarcia, 24, 78, 118 Madame de Stael, ix Mahfouz, Najib, 135 Marchand, Leslie, 14, 23, 25, 26, 33, 36, 57, 58, 75, 86, 118, 119, 156, 159 Marshall, William, 67, 159 Martin, Philip, 1, 53, 159 Masterson, James, 133, 159 Matar, Nabil, 59, 60, 160 Matisse, Henri, 163 Matthews, Charles, 16

Mavrocordatos, Pr. Alexander, 152 McGann, Jerome, xiii, 15, 26, 72, 85, 156, 159, 160 Melbourne, Lady Elizabeth, 118 Meletius of Janina, 32 Melikian, Anahid, 2, 99, 160 Mellor, Anne K., 123, 162 Meredith, James Creed, 158 Meyer, Eric, xi, xii, 48, 56, 57, 67, 68, 160 Michelangelo, 6, 115 Mickiewicz, Adam, 154 Minta, Stephen, 32, 160 Mitchell, Stephen, 133, 160 Monk, Samuel H., 108 Montagu, Lady Mary, 74, 160 Moore, Doris Langley, 123 Moore, Thomas, ix, xi, 52, 71, 84, 86, 91, 111, 125, 127, 129, 131, 148, 160 Moreri, Louis, 32, 126 Murad III, Sultan, 60 Murray, John, 52, 53, 75, 84, 86, 89, 120, 123, 150, 156, 159, 160 Mysticism, 10, 161 Napoleon, 60, 67, 151, 164 Newey, Vincent, 20, 99, 123, 156, 160 Nicholson, Reynold A., 73, 76, 79, 88, 91, 100, 158, 160 Norton, Lucy, 161 O‘Neill, Michael, 15, 161 Oedipus, 3, 21 Orientalism, vii, ix, x, xi, 1–4, 45, 47, 48, 51, 53–59, 68, 71, 99, 110, 123, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162–164 Oueijan, Harvey N., xvii

INDEX Oueijan, Naji B., ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 10, 99, 120, 125, 161 Paine, Thomas, 136 Park, Mungo, 32 Parker, Margret, 118 Pauli, Demetrii, 126 Perkins, David, 157, 161 Persian Tales, 45 Pichot, Amédée, 55 Pickthall, Mohammed M., 160 Pitt, William, 34 Pointer, Frank E., 161 Pope, Alexander, 150 Porter, Catherine, 163 Pouqueville, François, 126 Prothero, Rowland, 149, 150, 156 Qais ibn Mulawwah, 91 Queen Elizabeth of England, 60 Rebec, George, 147, 161 Reck, Rima D., 154, 161 Reed, John, 64, 161 Reiman, Donald H., 161 Richardson, Alan, 45, 48, 122, 123, 127, 161 Rihani, Albert, 135, 136, 162 Rihani, Ameen F., vii, xiii, 6, 100, 131, 133–138, 140, 141, 144, 162 The Book of Khalid, xix, 6, 134, 136, 137, 140, 144, 162 The Luzumiyat of Abul 'Ala, xiii, 100, 162 Ritvo, Harriet, 159 Roberts, David, 40 Robinson, Charles, 164 Robinson, Henry, 60, 162 Rogers, Robert, 133, 162 Rogers, Samuel, 88

171 Romanticism, 9, 10, 123, 154, 159, 160, 161, 163 Ross, Marlon, 9, 123, 124, 162 Roudiez, Leon S., 158 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 56, 136 Ruddick, W., 20, 151, 162 Rumi, Jelaluddin, xiii, 97, 102– 105, 121, 155 Russell, Bertrand, 64, 143, 162 Rycaut, Sir Paul, 86 Sadi, 5, 80, 86, 87, 90–92, 94, 105, 106, 120, 129 Said, Edward, ix, x, xi, xii, 1, 4, 47, 48, 55–59, 61, 67, 99, 162, 164 Sainte-Croix, 126 Schapiro, Barbara Ann, 12, 13, 162 Schiller, Friedrich von, 97, 108, 109, 112, 115, 158, 163 Schimmel, Annemarie, 100, 163 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 64 Scott, Walter, xi, 150 Sen, Amartya, x Shakespeare, William, 6, 115, 136, 154 Sharafuddin, Mohammed, xi, xii, 1, 56, 99, 163 Sheikh Hadj Farakh, 38 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 9, 19, 22, 88, 97, 111, 139, 141, 148, 157 Sligo, Marquis of, 37, 58 Smith, Byron Porter, 163 Smith, Porter, 1, 99 Snyder, Robert Lance, 19, 138, 151, 163 Soderholm, James, 53, 163 Southey, Robert, ix, 88, 150 Southgate, M. Therese, 163

172

LORD BYRON‘S ORIENTAL WORLD

Spinoza, 64 Stanhope, Lady Hester, x, 33– 37, 42, 43, 160 Steingass, F., 163 Stephanopoli, D., 126 Stephanopoli, N., 126 Stevans, Maryanne, 45, 46, 111, 163, 164 Sublime, 5, 6, 50, 101, 107– 115, 148 Sufism, vii, xiii, 5, 10, 93, 97– 100, 105, 106, 119, 161 Sulivan, Stephen, 91 Swift, Jonathan, 46, 53, 150 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 126 Teignmouth, Lord, 88, 89, 91 Tezla, Albert, 1, 85, 86, 126, 163 Thomas, Steve, 155 Thoreau, David, 136 Thornton, Thomas, 32 Todorov, Tztvan, xi, 48, 49, 109, 163

Treugutt, Stefan, 154, 164 Turner, Bryan, 1, 59, 60, 68, 164 Varisco, Martin, 1 Vernent, Horace, 47 Voltaire, 136 Warner, Malcolm, 47, 164 Waterman, David, 1, 123, 164 Watkins, Daniel, 63, 64, 65, 164 Webster, Lady Francis, 75, 119 Weiskel, Thomas, 108 Wellingon, Hubert, 161 Weston, Stephen, 91 Wiener, Harold, 1, 74, 76, 85, 91, 99, 126, 164 Windschuttle, Keith, 56, 164 Wolfson, Suzan, 123 Wordsworth, William, xiii, 12, 20, 22, 98, 139, 141, 148, 150, 161 Yazigi, Maya, 128 Yohannan, Professor, 91