2. The “Byronic Hero” and the notion of “Byronism”

The Byronic hero is usually described as an outsider, and with a contradictory nature; sometimes cruel, sometimes kind, devoted but unfaithful, and never contented, but eternally seeking out new sensations.

The more immediate precedents of the Byronic hero – a figure that Byron uses for purposes both of self-revelation and of self-concealment – were the protagonists of some of the Gothic novels of the later eighteenth century. Examples are Manfred, the ominous hero-villain of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the brooding, guilt-haunted monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), who each embody traits of Milton’s Satan, as well as Prometheus, Friedrich von Schiller's Karl Moor, and Sir Walter Scott's Marmion, the sentimental heroes found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Byron identified another alter ego in the towering historical figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, who to the contemporary imagination combined, in Satan’s manner, moral culpability with awe-inspiring power and grandeur. As befits their complex genealogy, Byron's various heroes exhibit not uniformity, but considerable diversity. To stress their distinctions we can classify Byron's protagonists under such rubrics as "Gothic Hero-Villains," "Heroes of Sensibility," and "Noble Outlaws." Among their possible traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, and such noble virtues as honor, altruism, courage, and pure love for a gentle woman. Their later Byronic incarnations include the heroes of the Eastern tales – Giaour, Selim, Conrad, Lara, Alp, and Hugo – as well as Manfred and Cain.

Byron first sketched out this hero with his Satanic-Gothic-Napoleonic lineage in 1812, in the opening stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. At this stage, he is rather crudely depicted as a young man, prematurely sated by sin, who wanders about in an attempt to escape society and his own memories. Conrad, the hero of The Corsair (1814), has become more isolated, darker, more complex in his history and inner conflict, and therefore more frightening and more compelling to the reader.  Gulnare’s image can be treated as the female “Byronic hero” – she can’t stand a repellent destiny of Seyd’s slave lover and she acts – kills him and refuses to come back to her Motherland forever. She disappears as well as the Corsair did. The hero of Lara (also 1814) is a finished product; he reappears two years later, with variations in canto 3 of Childe Harold and again the following year as the hero of Byron’s poetic drama Manfred. 

Immediately affecting the life, art, and even philosophy of the nineteenth century, the Byronic hero took on a life of his own. He became the model for the behavior of avant-garde young men and gave focus to the yearnings of emancipated young women. And Byron was fated to discover that the literary alter egos he had created could in turn exert power over him: his social disgrace following the breakup of his marriage in 1816 was declared by Walter Scott to be a consequence of how the poet had “Childe Harolded himself, and outlawed himself, into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination.” Literary history demonstrates, similarly, that Byron could at best participate in but not control the myth-making processes of Byronism. Upstaging him, many others were determined to have a hand in the myth-making. Byron had borrowed from late-eighteenth-century Gothic novels to create his persona but, in the nineteenth century, the Byronic hero would be absorbed back into the Gothic tradition.

The figure of the Byronic hero pervades much of his work, and Byron himself is considered to epitomize many of the characteristics of this literary figure. Many authors and artists of the Romantic movement show Byron's influence during the 19th century and beyond, including Charlotte and Emily Bronte. The Byronic hero presents an idealized but flawed character whose attributes include: having great talent, exhibiting great passion, having a distaste for society and social institutions, expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege, thwarted in love by social constraint or death, rebelling, suffering exile, hiding an unsavoury past, arrogance, overconfidence or lack of foresight, and ultimately, acting in a self-destructive manner.

The notion of “Byronic hero” is almost inseparable from the notion of “Byronism” – many leveled phenomenon that incarnates desire of absolute freedom, pushes off everything connected with traditional way of life of mankind. As the “Byronic hero” often challenges traditional morality, religion, “Byronism” is sometimes identified with “demonism” – appealing and terrible at the same time. “Byronism” appeals with desperate courage, scorn of every danger, even fatal one and pushes off with individualism.

“Byronism” as the philosophical-aesthetical phenomenon is much broader than the cycle of the “oriental poems” as it arrises from all the literary work of Byron and his life as well, but is brightly depicted in the fore mentioned poems.

3. “The Giaour”

The story's fascination as well as its occasional confusion lies in its sudden shifts in time, place, and speaker. Many events are presented out of sequence in a series of what Byron termed "disjointed fragments" ("Advertisement"). Especially striking is his narration of the story from multiple points of view – those of the poet-traveler, of a Moslem fisherman, of a monk, and of the Giaour himself. One can identify the hero as a remorseful and sympathetic Gothic Villain, who experiences no guilt for killing Hassan but suffers deep anguish for causing Leila's death.

The Giaour is the first important poem that Byron wrote after Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) had made him famous. It began the series of four immensely popular Oriental Tales that he wrote while he was the toast of literary London from 1812 until 1816. The title is an Arabic word for “infidel” and refers to the poem's hero, who is described by his enemy as “apostate from his own vile faith”. The poem tells the story of the Giaour's flight from the court of the despot Hassan, whom he has cuckolded. Hassan has his concubine, Leila, sewn up into a sack and drowned for her infidelity. The Giaour subsequently ambushes Hassan and kills him. But his revenge is only a hollow victory. Haunted by remorse for his past misdeeds, the Giaour retreats into a monastery, where, tormented by guilt, he declines to take part in the monks' devotions and sees visions of Hassan's severed hand. He refuses to be consoled or absolved, bearing his guilt with a noble superiority. He does, however, confess his crimes before dying, leaving only his story behind him.

The poem is not a simple linear narrative, but a series of disjointed fragments narrated from a number of points of view, and following no strict chronology. The Giaour is formally more complicated than any of these other narratives, a purposely fragmentary work with three narrators (and three points of view) of the disjointed events. The main story, in the Oxford Companion to English Literature's concise description, "is of a female slave, Leila, who loves the Giaour . . . and is in consequence bound and thrown in a sack into the sea by her Turkish lord, Hassan. The Giaour avenges her by killing Hassan, then in grief and remorse banishes himself to a monastery."

The poem is opened with the author’s address to Greece and its former glory:

No breath of air to break the wave

That rolls below the Athenian's grave,

That tomb which, gleaming o'er the cliff,

First greets the homeward-veering skiff

High o'er the land he saved in vain;

When shall such Hero live again?

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90

'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more!

So coldly sweet, so deadly fair,

We start, for Soul is wanting there.

Hers is the loveliness in death,

That parts not quite with parting breath;

But beauty with that fearful bloom,

That hue which haunts it to the tomb,

Expression's last receding ray,

A gilded Halo hovering round decay,

The farewell beam of Feeling past away!

100

Spark of that flame, perchance of heavenly birth,

Which gleams, but warms no more its cherished earth!

Clime of the unforgotten brave!

Whose land from plain to mountain-cave

Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave!

Shrine of the mighty! can it be,

That this is all remains of thee?

Approach, thou craven crouching slave:

Say, is not this Thermopylц?

These waters blue that round you lave,--

110

Oh servile offspring of the free--

Pronounce what sea, what shore is this?

The gulf, the rock of Salamis!

These scenes, their story not unknown,

Arise, and make again your own;

Snatch from the ashes of your Sires

The embers of their former fires;

And he who in the strife expires

Will add to theirs a name of fear

That Tyranny shall quake to hear,

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And leave his sons a hope, a fame,

They too will rather die than shame:

For Freedom's battle once begun,

Bequeathed by bleeding Sire to Son,

Though baffled oft is ever won.

Bear witness, Greece, thy living page!

Attest it many a deathless age!

However, then it’s quite difficult to decided who is the narrator, hid behind the fisrt person singular pronoun – either the Turkish fisherman who witnessed the act of execution of unfaithful Hassan’s wife, who gave her love to the stranger of other religion, to the Giaour; or an accidental comer who saw in the Giaour’s face in the moonlight while the former was galoping a horse at night, when he failed to kidnap Leila from harem; or again accidental witness of the Giaour’s (whose name is still a secret as he is a mere giaour – a person foreign for both Muslims and Christians) last days. This can be compared with the misunderstanding of Byron’s views both in literary and political societies.

The peaceful population of blossoming valleys is scared by the appearance of a morous figure of a demonic rider – stranger for both enslaved and their masters, always bearing his burden of fatal curse:

Who thundering comes on blackest steed,

With slackened bit and hoof of speed?

Beneath the clattering iron's sound

The caverned Echoes wake around