Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture, by John Clubbe, Hampshire, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. 345 pp.

Walking into the Owen Gallery on New York’s 75th Street in April of 1999, Professor John Clubbe saw a gorgeous portrait of Lord Byron hanging on the gallery wall. It left him utterly astonished. Clubbe stood transfixed staring at Byron’s face. A Byron scholar for forty years, he knew all the major portraits of the poet but had never seen this one. His perfunctory judgment told him this was the work of a great master. Below the canvas, a card attributed the portrait to Thomas Sully (1783-1872). For the next six years Clubbe sought out the enigma of the portrait and the painter.

George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824) held both Europe and America spell bound in an age described as Romantic. Romantics reacted against Europe’s secular materialism brought about by the rise of deterministic science. Yeats summed up their disgust perfectly—“Newton, Descartes took the world and left us excrement instead.” Newton imprisoned man in a world of infinite matter without a beginning or an end, and Descartes removed himself from the world of matter, retreating into abstractions of his mind—“I think therefore I am”. Both systems alienated man from himself and from other men. One theory made man a material beast and the other a disembodied intellect. T.S. Eliot described this development as a “dissociation of sensibility,” which still afflicts the modern world.

Poets approach the total reality and mystery of human existence and can do so with reverence. They know that human beings encounter things through the senses before they think them. Reverence lends itself to love and to a deeper understanding for the mystery of things, a dimension beyond the realm of science. Mystery involves this question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” This something of creation suggests a creator. Poets see the created world as a gift of love and declare, “I love therefore I am.” This draws them to others as they evoke and recall things loved in a community that transcends time.

The new scientific method rejected the validity of such poetic knowledge. It also rejected past human experience, common sense, and religion. Sadly the Romantics never clearly articulated a refutation against the godless universe of the scientist. Instead of reasoning their way back to sanity by incorporating head and heart, the Romantics tended to deny reason, postulating feeling instead. They turned inward on themselves. Byron defied the modern world with aristocratic disdain. In Don Juan he ridiculed a deracinated world:

When Bishop Berkeley said ’there was no matter,‘
And proved it—’twas no matter what he said:
They say his system ’tis in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it? I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the world a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it.