since the aristocratic rebels have enough to eat, there must be other reasons for dissatisfaction. The rebels I am talking about do not include the leaders of factions that are temporarily deprived of power, but only those whose own philosophy requires changes beyond personal success. It is also possible that the desire for power is the potential source of their dissatisfaction, but there is a criticism of secular politics in their conscious thoughts. If this criticism is fully in-depth, it will take the form of Titan's endless self-assertion, or, for those who retain some superstitions, it will take the form of Satan. Both of these ingredients can be found in Byron. These two components are popular among the broad social classes that can not be regarded as aristocratic classes, mainly through the people he influenced.
Aristocratic rebellious philosophy, with its growth, development and transformation near maturity, was once the spiritual source of a series of revolutionary movements from the Charcoal Party after Napoleon's downfall to Hitler's great power in 1933. At each stage, this rebellious philosophy has instilled a corresponding way of thinking and emotion among intellectuals and artists.
obviously, a noble will not become a rebel if his temperament and environment are not a little special. Byron's environment is very special. His memory of his earliest childhood is the quarrel between his parents; His mother is a cruel woman who makes him afraid and vulgar; His nanny has both vicious and strict Calvinist theology; His lameness filled him with shame and prevented him from becoming a member of the group at school. After a period of poverty, at the age of ten, he suddenly became a Lord and became the owner of Newstead House. He inherited his great-uncle. His great-uncle "Evil Lord" killed a man in a duel thirty-three years ago, and since then, his neighbors have abandoned him. Byron has always been a family that indulges in lawlessness, and even more so is his mother's ancestor Gordon. After living in the filth of a poor alley in Aberdeen, the child is naturally happy with his knighthood and government, and he is eager to gain the character of his ancestors to thank them for the land they gave him. Even if their belligerence got them into trouble in recent years, he heard that belligerence had brought them fame in previous centuries. One of his earliest poems, "On Leaving Newstead Abbey", describes his feelings at that time, which is admiration for his ancestors who fought in the Cross Army, in keresey and in the wasteland of maston. He ended the poem with such a pious determination: he will live like you, or he will die like you; After the body decays, may his bones be mixed with yours.
This is not a rebel's mood, but it is reminiscent of the modern aristocrat "Childe" Hallor, who imitated the medieval ministers. When he was a college student, he got his own income for the first time. He wrote that he felt independent like a "German sovereign who made coins himself", or like a Cherokee chief who didn't make coins at all, but enjoyed something more precious, namely "freedom". I am ecstatic to mention that goddess, because my lovely mother is so tyrannical. "
Byron later wrote a lot of lofty poems praising freedom, but we must know that the freedom he praised was the freedom of the German state owner or Cherokee chief, not the inferior freedom that ordinary people can enjoy if they want to.
regardless of his family background and his knighthood, his aristocratic relatives kept him at a distance, making him feel that he was not in the same group socially. His mother is so disgusting that everyone looks at him with suspicion. He knew that she was vulgar and secretly feared that he had the same defect himself. This gave birth to his peculiar wonderful mixture of snobbery and rebellion. If he can't be a modern gentleman, he will be a bold collector in the style of his ancestors who participated in the Crusades, or perhaps a more fierce but more romantic one like the leader of the Emperor's Party-they curse God and man on their way to glorious demise. Medieval knight novels and history became his etiquette textbooks. He committed crimes like the royal family in Hohenstaufen, and died fighting Muslims like a crusader.
His shyness and loneliness prompted him to seek comfort from love, but because he was unconsciously looking for a mother instead of a mistress, everyone disappointed him except Augusta. In 1816, he claimed to Shelley that he was "an Americano, a Calvinist and an Augustine", and his Calvinist beliefs made him feel that his way of life was evil. But he said to himself, evil is the genetic evil in his blood, and it is the doomed bad luck of Almighty God. If that's the case, since he must be excellent, he will become an excellent sinner and dare to do things beyond the courage of those fashionable lotharios he wants to despise.
He sincerely loves Augusta, because she belongs to his lineage-the Ishmaelites of Byron family-and more simply because she has a kind care for his daily happiness as a sister. But that's not all she has to offer him. Because of her simplicity and her kind and gentle temperament, she became a means to provide him with extremely happy narcissistic regrets. He can feel that he is equal to the biggest sinner-a man equal to Manfried, Cain, and almost Satan. The Calvinist, the noble and the rebel were also satisfied; The romantic lover, who was hurt by the loss of the only person in the world who could still arouse affection and tenderness in his heart, was also satisfied.
Byron felt that he could rival Satan, but he never dared to put himself in the position of God. In the process of arrogance, Nietzsche did the following step. He said, "If there are gods, how can we stand it if we are not gods?" So there are no gods. " Pay attention to the unspoken premise in this reasoning: "Anything that hurts our self-esteem must be judged wrong." Nietzsche, like Byron, was brought up by religion, even to a deeper extent, but because of his superior reason, he found a better way to escape from reality than Satan. But Nietzsche was always very sympathetic to Byron. He said:
"The tragedy is that if we have strict methods of seeking truth in emotion and reason, we can't believe the dogmas in religion and metaphysics, but on the other hand, through the development of human nature, we have become very delicate and sensitive, and need a supreme means of salvation and comfort. This leads to the danger that man will bleed to death because of the truth he knows. Byron expressed this point in an immortal poem:
Knowledge is bitterness: those who know the most must lament an ominous truth the deepest-the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. "
Sometimes Byron occasionally approaches Nietzsche's point of view. But generally speaking, Byron's ethical views are contrary to his actual actions and are always strictly traditional.
a great man looks like a god to Nietzsche; In Byron's view, it was usually the Titan who was fighting with himself. Sometimes, however, he also depicts a sage-"Pirate" who is similar to Zarathustra. In his communication with his subordinates, he has a better grasp of their souls and leads the despicable people's hearts with that preemptive means, making them shudder.
It is this hero who "hates human beings so much that he doesn't feel remorse". A footnote here categorically says that this "pirate" is in line with the reality of human nature, because the Vandals' king Ganserik, the emperor's party tyrant Ezelino and a pirate in Anna, luisi all show the same characteristics.
Byron's search for heroes was not limited to the Eastern Mediterranean countries and the Middle Ages, because it was not difficult to put a romantic coat on Napoleon. Napoleon had a profound influence on the imagination of Europeans in the 19th century. The thoughts of krause Witz, Stendal, Heine, Fichte and Nietzsche, and the actions of Italian patriots were all inspired by his spirit. His ghost swaggered throughout the era, the only force strong enough to resist industrialism and commerce, and poured a burst of ridicule on peace theory and store management. Tolstoy's War and Peace intends to get rid of this ghost, but in vain, because this ghost has never been more powerful than it is now.
During the "Hundred Days of Prosperity", Byron publicly expressed his wish for Napoleon's victory. When he heard of Waterloo's defeat, he said, "I'm so sad.".
Only once did he feel disgusted with his hero temporarily: it was in 1814, when suicide (in his opinion) was more respectable than abdication. At that time, he sought comfort from Washington's virtue, but as soon as Napoleon came back from Elba, such efforts were no longer needed. When Byron died, in France, "many newspapers said that Napoleon and Byron, the two great men of this century, died almost at the same time." Carlisle thought Byron was "the noblest man in Europe" at that time, and felt as if he had "lost a brother"; He later fell in love with Goethe, but still compared Byron and Napoleon:
"For your noble people, it is almost necessary to publish a certain work of art in one local language or another. Because, properly speaking, what else is it except to say that this is an argument with the devil before you start fighting with it? Your Byron published his "Sorrow of Lord George" with poems, essays and a lot of other things: your Bonaparte staged his opera "Sorrow of Napoleon" with amazing grandeur; The music is the sound of cannons and the screaming of people all over the world; His stage lighting is a fire all over the sky; His rhythm and recitation are the sound of soldiers in battle and the sound of falling cities. " Indeed, in the next three chapters, Carlisle issued a categorical order: "Close your Byron and open your Goethe". But Byron is infiltrated in his blood, and Goethe is always an interest.
In Carlyle's view, Goethe and Byron are opposites; In Alfred de Miao Sai's view, they are accomplices in the evil business of pouring melancholy toxin into the happy Gaul soul. It seems that most young French people in that era only knew Goethe through The Sorrows of Werther, and they didn't know the Olympian Goethe at all. Miao Sai blamed Byron for not getting comfort from the Adriatic Sea and the Countess in Guiqiu-this is not true, because he stopped writing Manfried after knowing her. But "Don Juan" is not read as much in France as Goethe's more pleasant poems. Despite Miao Sai's bad comments, since then most French poets have always used Byronic misfortune as the best material for their chanting.
In Miao Sai's view, Byron and Goldstein are the greatest geniuses of the century only after Napoleon. Born in 181, Muse Saisheng belonged to the generation he described as "concusent redeux batailles" (conceived between two battles) in a narrative lyric poem about the rise and fall of the French Empire. In Germany, there are different feelings about Napoleon. There are people like Heine who regard him as a powerful disseminator of liberalism, a destroyer of serfdom, an enemy of orthodoxy, and a person who makes hereditary small landlords tremble; There are also some people who regard him as the enemy of Christ and pretend to be the destroyer of the noble German nation. He is an unjust person who has thoroughly proved that Teutonic virtue can only be preserved by the stubborn hatred of France. Bismarck completed a synthesis: Napoleon is still the enemy of Christ after all, but he is not just an enemy to be hated, but an enemy to be imitated. Nietzsche admitted this compromise, and he said with horror that the classical war era was coming, which was not the French Revolution but Napoleon's gift. In this way, Byron's legacy-nationalism, satanism and hero worship-became a part of the German spiritual complex.
Byron is not gentle, but he is as violent as a thunderstorm. He speaks Rousseau's words, which can also be used by himself. He said that Rousseau was an eloquent man who cast charm on his passion and squeezed eloquence out of his misery ...
However, he knew how to add beautiful clothes to madness and daub a wonderful hue on his wrong action thoughts.
But there are profound differences between the two men. Rousseau is sentimental, Byron is fanatical; Rousseau's cowardice is exposed on the outside, Byron's cowardice is hidden inside; Rousseau appreciates virtue as long as it is simple, while Byron appreciates evil as long as it is thunderous. Although this difference is only the difference between the two stages of anti-social instinctive resistance, it is still very important, and it shows the developing direction of the movement.
george gordon byron in Greece must admit that Byron's romanticism is only half sincere. Sometimes, he will say that Popper's poems are better than his own, but this opinion is mostly just his thoughts in a certain mood. The world has always tried to simplify Byron, deleting his boundless despair and posturing factors in his contempt for human beings. Byron, like many other famous figures, is more important as a mythical figure than the real him. As a mythical figure, he is extremely important, especially on the European continent.