'The Glory and the Nothing of a Name'

Abstract

Stuck in Dover on 24 April 1816 when bad winds were delaying his final departure from England for a day, Byron slipped away after dinner to visit the grave of Charles Churchill - 'him who blazed / The comet of a season'. He peered at 'that neglected turf and quiet stone, / With name no clearer than the names unknown, / Which lay unread around it' ('Churchill's Grave', 1-2, 5-7). 'Churchill's Grave: A Fact Literally Rendered', his poem on the subject, was, uniquely for him, modelled on a Wordsworthian encounter-poem. The 'fact' is the limited recovery of the sexton's memory. He is a simple soul, a Simon Lee, through whom a saving truth can be discovered. The sexton knows little about the eighteenth-century satirist, who went to Boulogne to see Wilkes, died there, and was buried in this graveyard half a century earlier, yet, bit by bit - Byron uses the strange phrase 'As he caught / As 'twere the twilight of a former sun' (25-26) - he pieces things together in awkward speech: 'I believe the man of whom / You wot, who lies in this selected tomb, / Was a most famous writer in his day' (27-29). Byron's idiom is Wordsworth's but the thought to which the poem leads in its last eight lines is not: Ye smile, I see ye, ye profane ones! all the while, Because my homely phrase the truth would tell. You are the fools, not I - for I did dwell With a deep thought, and with a soften'd eye, On that old Sexton's natural homily, In which there was Obscurity and Fame, The Glory and the Nothing of a name. (36-43) The 'deep thought' and 'soften'd eye' are Wordsworth's but the last line bears Byron's cadence and Dr Johnson's moral. The 'Glory and the Nothing' of Charles Churchill's name confirms the legacy of Johnson's Charles XII, who 'left the Name, at which the World grew pale, / To point a Moral, or adorn a Tale' ('Vanity of Human Wishes', 221-22), but not a Lyrical Ballad. In Switzerland a few months later, Byron wrote the 'Epistle to Augusta', at roughly the same time that he was finishing 'Churchill's Grave'. Love and fame, he says in the Epistle, have 'made me all which they can make - a Name' (13). Byron, significantly, devotes 14 lines of 'Childish Recollections' to the names carved in wood at Harrow, amongst which is his own. Here is Lamartine reacting to that name: Toi, dont le monde encore ignore le vrai nom, Esprit mysterieux, mortel, ange ou demon, Qui que tu sois, Byron, bon ou fatal genie, J'aime de tes concerts la sauvage harmonie. (O thou, of whom the world still does not know the true name, mysterious spirit, mortal, angel, or demon, whatever [whoever] you may be, Byron, good or fatal spirit, I love the wild harmony of your music.)1 Lamartine says 'Byron' here. In Le Dernier Chant he calls him 'Harold', but he is the only English poet regularly called by a title. He has been since George Bayron Gordon (his name in the Aberdeen School Register) became George Gordon, Lord Byron (May 1798). He was never called George, though Giovanni Prati entitled his poem 'A Giorgio Byron',2 which would not have pleased its designatee. He is 'Pilgrim of Eternity' (30) in Adonais but the Shelleys called him Albe in private. On his mother-inlaw's death, he declared his name to be Noel Byron. Initially it was pronounced with a short 'i' but then, and forever, Byron. 'George Gordon Byron' tells us that his mother was Scottish, a Gordon from Gight; his father, English, a Byron from Nottinghamshire. However, Lamartine's 'Byron' is not familial but the 'vrai nom' of an 'esprit mysterieux'. I want to call this vrai nom 'abyssal'. Act I of Cain opens with a family scene. Cain is an awkward member. Act II opens with the stage direction 'an abyss of space', into which Cain is swept, away from family and home, exhilarated and then depressed. He recognises a new identity in this new placing: 'I'll stay here' (II, ii, 106) he says gloomily, but he does not - he returns to his family group and sends his brother into 'the cold and still embrace' of death (III, i, 375). …