You may not need to know this

John Bayley

  • A Wicked Irony: The Rhetoric of Lermontov’s ‘A Hero of Our Time’ by Andrew Barratt and A.D.P. Briggs
    Bristol Classical Press, 139 pp, £25.00, May 1989, ISBN 1 85399 020 5
  • The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth by Andrew Baruch Wachtel
    Stanford, 262 pp, $32.50, May 1990, ISBN 0 8047 1795 8

One of the ‘quests’ of Byronian romanticism was to find out which feelings come by nature and which ones can be cultivated as part of a personal repertoire. The relation between spontaneity and the will was found to be a complex one, and Byronic literature made the most of the fact. Byron himself is a dab hand at suggesting the real feeling that lies behind the assumed one, a ‘real feeling’ necessarily called in question by the fact that the revealer is revealing it. The Rousseau point of view – you may not need to know this but I need to tell you – is merely the converse of the darkly enigmatic self-tormentor, with his one virtue and a thousand crimes.

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