Abstract
By the end of 1814, when Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was in its ninth edition and his verse tales numbered four, Byron was a poet with a number of problems. He had mined his experiences of exotic travels almost to exhaustion — he had some unpublished scraps of Oriental poetry, but seemed incapable of turning them into a fifth verse tale. The sheen had worn off his celebrity, making fame a fact of life which was rapidly becoming routine. Worse still, his series of four Turkish Tales was increasingly being charged with that most un Byronic of qualities: predictability. Lord Byron, it was whispered, had written himself out, and what was to come promised only paler and paler imitations of his former glories. Where once Byron’s poetry had made him a celebrity, it now seemed that his poetry would be read only because he was a celebrity. George Daniel, in The Modern Dunciad (1814), put the complaint into Popeian couplets:
The town is pleas’d when BYRON will rehearse,
And finds a thousand beauties in his verse;
So fix’d his fame — that write whate’er he will,
The patient public must admire it still;
Yes, — though bereft of half his force and fire,
They still must read, — and, dozing, must admiref.]1
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Notes
George Daniel, The Modern Dunciad: A Satire (1814), cited in Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 76.
Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1891), I, 208.
See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans, by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), especially ‘“Making Do”: Uses and Tactics’, pp. 29–42.
There are discussions of Hebrew Melodies in Frederick W. Shilstone, Byron and the Myth of Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 99–112
Bernard Blackstone, Byron: A Survey (London: Longman, 1975), pp. 129–45
Gordon K. Thomas, ‘The Forging of an Enthusiasm: Byron and the Hebrew Melodies’, Neophilologus, 75 (1991), 626–36
Gordon K. Thomas, ‘Finest Orientalism, Western Sentimentalism, Proto-Zionism: The Muses of Byron’s Hebrew Melodies’, Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 1 (1993), 51–66
Caroline Franklin, ‘ “Some Samples of the Finest Orientalism”: Byronic Philhellenism and Proto-Zionism at the Time of the Congress of Vienna’, in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 221–42
Graham Pont, ‘Byron and Nathan: A Musical Collaboration’, The Byron Journal, 27 (1999), 51–65
Judith Chernaik, ‘The Wild-Dove Hath Her Nest’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 5265, 27 February 2004, 12–14.
Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass have waged a campaign for the Hebrew Melodies to be understood as songs, beginning with Paul Douglass, ‘Hebrew Melodies as Songs: Why we Need a New Edition’, The Byron Journal, 14 (1986), 12–21; continuing with their contributions to the Paderborn Symposium: Frederick Burwick ‘Identity and Tradition in the Hebrew Melodies’ and Paul Douglass, ‘Isaac Nathan’s Settings for Hebrew Melodies’, both in English Romanticism: The Paderborn Symposium (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1985), pp. 123–38, 139–51; and culminating in their facsimile edition of Nathan’s settings: A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern, by Isaac Nathan and Lord Byron, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988). This edition is hereafter cited as Burwick and Douglass.
William Roberts, ‘Review of The Corsair, by Lord Byron’, British Review, 5 (February 1814), 506–11 (p. 506). See also Theodore Redpath’s comment that ‘[a]s the series [of Turkish Tales] went on there were […] grumbles on the score of monotony’.
Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807–1824 (London: Harrap, 1973), p. 181.
For example, ‘Visionary as the prospect may be, we cannot resist the temptation to indulge ourselves, for a moment, in realizing the glorious emancipation which Christianity would induce on the faculties of so noble a mind. […] Deeply were it to be regretted, that such a mind should be occupied with anything short of the infinite and the eternal!’ Josiah Conder, ‘Review of Byron, The Corsair, 4th Edition (1814)’, Eclectic Review, 2nd Series, 1 (April 1814), 416–26 (pp. 424–5).
‘H.S. B’, ‘Lines occasioned by reading The Bride of Abydos’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 84, no. 1 (1814), 592.
Thomas L. Ashton, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 26.
Joseph Slater, ‘Byron’s Hebrew Melodies’, Studies in Philology, 49 (1952), 75–94 (p. 76).
Roberts, ‘Review of Byron, Hebrew Melodies (1815)’, 200.
See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
Rex Butler, Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (London: Sage, 1999), p. 17.
Donald Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed, 9 vols (London: Garland, 1972), part B, 5 vols.
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© 2007 Tom Mole
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Mole, T. (2007). The Handling of Hebrew Melodies. In: Byron’s Romantic Celebrity. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288386_6
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