Byron and the Artifice of Sincerity: 'To the Po' and its Epistolary Analogues

Abstract

My subject here is a self-subverting artifice: the mutable blend of false truths, true lies, serious triviality and trivial seriousness that constitutes the sincerity of a masked man such as Byron. I will explore this subject by way of a case study - a close comparative reading of 'To the Po' and some of Byron's letters to or about Teresa Guiccioli that circumscribe the poem. However, this essay is also a shoutout to Jerome McGann on the occasion of the birthday that is apparently his seventieth if, like the Don Juan narrator, we want to be particular about dates. I first became aware of McGann's scholarly work as a 23-year-old graduate student. That initial encounter introduced me to an expert on ... Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I was using McGann's text based on the hard-to-find first edition of Bulwer's novel Pelham, a brilliantly witty, surprisingly wise, once popular but now too little read book that has much to say about mask-wearing, figure-cutting and how both allow for simultaneous revelation and concealment.1 Pelham the dandiacal protagonist is persistently under-rated by the habitues of his milieu because he makes himself seem much less substantial than he actually is, and Pelham the book has been neglected by scholars for much the same reason. Both offend against commonplace notions of sincerity, the novel doing so in part because, until its mask-dropping conclusion, it deftly follows the lead of Don Juan. The protagonist-narrator Pelham, like his young creator Bulwer, emulates Byron's cheerfully sceptical, amiably ironic, tolerant and yet unremittingly moral aspect. And Byron's riff on the trope of Romantic sincerity, as I would gradually learn over the next decades in ever-increasing detail, is one of the many matters McGann understands as well as or better than anyone else. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling sees the pre-modern English understanding of sincerity, 'communicating without deceiving or misleading others', as less exacting than its French counterpart, which entails recognising and then disclosing the truth about one's self. He goes on to assert that a watershed moment in the making of the modern sensibility was Rousseau's conflation of these two sincerities. The conflated Anglo-French sincerity was, more or less, what readers expected from Romantic poetry, a discourse generally meant to demonstrate, as McGann puts it, 'a deeply felt relation binding the poetic Subject to the poetic subject, the speaking voice to the matter being addressed'.2 Being two-faced or many-faced is at first blush the antithesis of Romantic sincerity: it is apparent hypocrisy. And yet, as McGann, following Kierkegaard, points out, Romantic sincerity founds itself on a contradiction and performs an illusion.3 Byron, the poet of self-conscious mobility, exposes and articulates the contradiction in many varying ways, perhaps the most concisely notable and quotable being a couplet from late in Don Juan: 'But if a writer would be quite consistent, / How could he possibly show things existent?' (XV, 86). As to the illusion, which involves an indirection that belies rhetoric and instead pretends that a reflective presence, indifferent to or unaware of an audience, engages in self-communion - well, Byron habitually centrestages rather than displaces his rhetoric-that-conceals-rhetoric. Like most writers, he adopts a voice and envisions an audience. Unlike most Romantic writers, he does so directly - or with an appearance of directness that can be the ultimate indirection. The paradoxical consequences of masked self-revelation in art result in such literary situations as Oscar Wilde's character Jack Worthing posing as 'Earnest' in town but discovering that he is indeed Earnest after all. Or there is the literally reformed rakehero of Max Beerbohm's Regency fable, 'The Happy Hypocrite', Lord George Hell, behaving virtuously and donning an angelic false face to win the heart and hand of an ingenue and eventually finding that his actual face has improved in correspondence with his change of heart so that it now has come to look just like the beautiful saintly mask that once belied but now reveals his true nature. …