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Updated: June 21, 2025
He would not be bothered by going to Courts with Walpole, or if he did he stood in the corner of the ballroom and looked on while Walpole danced. What he cared for was La Grande Chartreuse, with its cliffs and pines and torrents and hanging woods. He is the forerunner of the Byronic traveller who delighted in the terrific aspects of nature and disdained mankind.
The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the physical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may have taught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom. We think of bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of people. The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism.
This Phileas Fogg was a puzzling gentleman, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled the poet Byron at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, peaceful Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old. Certainly Phileas Fogg was an Englishman, but it was more doubtful whether he was a Londoner.
The latter were certainly reduced to tears; nor am I sure that Mr. Bowman succeeded in preserving a manly composure. At any rate, when I came downstairs, it was in a broken voice that he wished me the compliments of the season, and a little later on, when he paid his visit of ceremony at breakfast, he was far from cheerful: even Byronic, I might almost say, in his outlook on life.
Wearing neither coat nor vest, the bartender's ruffled shirt displayed a glistening stone; the sleeves were ornamented with gold buttons and the lace collar had a Byronic roll. "What will you have, sir?" he said in a well-modulated voice to a big Virginian, who had preceded Barnes into the room. "A julep," was the reply, "and, while you are making it, a little whisky straight."
More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to a man left stranded in every country in Europe, during the period of his poetic activity. A transitional and unstable movement of society inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful enough to make its poetic expression eternal.
During one of the reader's pauses to impress upon them the splendors of the Byronic imagery, and eke its human heart-warmth, good Aunt Delia, with defiant looks about the circle, broke in with: "I shouldn't wonder if Shakspere has been made too much over." Mrs. Keyts stepped loyally into the breach thus effected.
Over the world he goes on his solitary expeditions, hunting animals, hunting men, making notes of what foreign armies are doing, what are the chief thoughts occupying the minds of distant and dangerous tribesmen, and he never goes about it blusteringly or with the Byronic mystery of the stage detective.
They raised the old war-cry of liberty over battle-fields long silent; they extolled to heaven the renown of the rebellious dead; their very periods glowed with Garibaldian red, white, and green; and rising to Byronic exaltation they concluded their nationalist effusions by adjuring freedom's weather-beaten flag: "Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind!"
It is on the question how much of true poetry lies behind and independent of the scenery and properties of Byronism, that the great debate arises. Was the author of the poems from Childe Harold to Don Juan really gifted with the poetical "sincerity and strength" which have been awarded him by a critic of leanings so little Byronic in the ordinary sense of Matthew Arnold?
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