15

An Essay upon the Source of Positive

Pleasure

The accident Polidori mentioned to Murray in his letter of 19 October

1817 had been reported in the Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette for
20 September (the report also, incidentally, suggests that Polidori was
using an anglicized form of his name, presumably in an attempt to make
himself more acceptable to Norwich):
A melancholy accident happened on Sunday evening [14
September], at Costessy: - As Dr. Polydore was returning from
Sir George Jerningham's in a gig, the night being dark, and
following a gentleman's carriage which was going at a slow
rate, he drove against a tree, upset and broke the gig, and
falling on his head, a violent concussion of the brain was the
consequence. The Doctor was removed back to Costessy. - He
remained for several days in an almost senseless state, but
yesterday he was considered rather better.1
He stayed at Costessy, Sir George's estate, until his recovery.
Sir George and Lady Frances Jerningham were prominent members of
the local Catholic gentry. Polidori seems to have known them, and to
have enjoyed their patronage, before the accident: no doubt they were
among the 'good introductions' he would mention to Murray. He later
wrote a sonnet celebrating their continued kindness to him.2 Their
daughter, Charlotte Georgina, was one of Gaetano's pupils. Soon after
Polidori's recovery, his father ended a letter with: 'Present my regards to
the amiable and studious Miss Jerningham, from whom I await with
pleasure some Italian translation'; he also promised to send her his
collected works.3 Medwin reports that Polidori, who, 'like most Italians
... was very susceptible of the tender passion,' fell in love with her during
his convalescence, but declines to vouch for the story - even though he
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 153

will vouch for almost anything.4 There is no record of Charlotte

Georgina's feelings towards Polidori; her grandmother, the matriarch of
the family, found him 'a Clever and well Looking young man.'5
When Byron heard of the accident, he wrote to Murray: 'I am as sorry
to hear of Dr. Polidori's accident as one can be for a person for whom one
has a dislike - and - something of contempt - when he gets well tell me -
and how he gets on in the sick line - poor fellow!'6 Byron's letter arrived
in the middle of Polidori's attempt to persuade Murray to publish his
medical journal; it cannot have been entirely helpful.
It is likely that Polidori never completely recovered. If, as the Norfolk
Chronicle implies, he was unconscious for four or five days, he almost
certainly suffered some brain damage. A number of his later letters
complain about his health. Martineau suggests that his last years 'were
very possibly all the wilder for that concussion of the brain.'7 At the
inquest into his death, Deagostini testified that an 'abrupt way' had been
characteristic of him since the accident.8
The accident had a catastrophic effect on his literary career. All his
larger works were either composed or at least conceived before it -
except for a piece of non-fictional prose inspired directly by it. 'As I was
in danger of death,' he later explained, T naturally revolved many
speculative subjects in my mind. Amongst others, it happened that I took
up that of Pleasure.'9 The result was An Essay upon the Source of Positive
Pleasure, published in June 1818.
The argument of the essay depends on the distinction drawn by Burke,
in his Philosophical Enquiry, between positive pleasure and the pleasure
arising from the diminution of pain or relief of discomfort, which Burke
calls relative pleasure or delight.10 The essay's thesis is that positive
pleasure is always, strictly speaking, imaginary - that it
depends upon that action of the mind which combines images
of past or future objects together, either alone, or with those
actually passing; so that in fact, there is no positive active
pleasure depending upon an uncombined stimulus, and that
we must not look for positive pleasure from the senses, or
reason, except inasmuch as they may afterwards cause the
imagination to act.11
The essay's claim that the imagination is the only source of positive
pleasure should not be confused with such Romantic exaltations of the
faculty as that in Biographia Literaria, which had been published in 1817
and which, if Polidori had retained his interest in Coleridge, he may have
known. The essay's presentation of the imagination is, if anything, more
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154 After Byron: 1816-1821

like Coleridge's presentation of fancy, a mere 'mode of memory emanci-

pated from the order of time and space,' which, like 'the ordinary
memory,' 'must receive all its materials ready made from the law of
association.' 12 It also bears some resemblance to the presentation of the
imagination in the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) of
Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), professor of Moral Philosophy at Edin-
burgh; Polidori seems to draw on Stewart's work at a number of points in
the essay. But Stewart exalts the imagination almost as much as Col-
eridge and Shelley do: he considers it, for example, to be an important
source of sympathy.13 Polidori's essay, in comparison, is strikingly re-
ductive in its treatment not only of the imagination, but of human nature
as a whole.
The essay sets out to prove its thesis in three ways. First, it examines
the pleasures of the senses to show that they are either, in Burke's terms,
relative or dependent on the association of ideas, or on some other
operation of the imagination. Second, it examines the pleasures of
memory, experience, and expectation (or, as the essay puts it, of the past,
present, and future), showing that these too are all imaginary.14 Third, it
examines the role of pleasure and of the imagination in the history of
civilization. It ends paradoxically, by urging the reader to give up the
pursuit of illusory pleasures in favour of real - that is, imaginary - ones.
This argument is enclosed in a curious narrative frame. As Polidori
explains in his preface, he took up the subject of pleasure while on his
sickbed:

I fell asleep while it still occupied my mind, and seemed to be

conveyed, by unknown means, to a place, where many of the
friends of my past life were assembled to discuss the same
subject. One amongst them maintained that positive pleasure
could not exist independently of the imagination. When I
awoke, a confused remembrance of the chain of arguments, my
friend had gone through, remaining with me, I thought them,
to say the least, so specious, that I attempted to write them
down, filling up the lacunae, where my memory failed, by
what my own ingenuity supplied; the result is this Essay,
which yet preserves the form of a speech.

Polidori means that the essay includes all the parts of a classical oration.
'Kubla Khan' had been published in 1816; it is likely that he had read it at
Diodati.
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 155

Polidori hoped that this anecdote would allow him to disclaim the
more heterodox or controversial ideas propounded in the essay. His
preface concludes:

That these are the sentiments of another person I hope none

will attempt to deny; for if the opinion of a certain philosopher
be true, that sleep is for the convenience of souls having
converse with dead or distant friends, there is not the slightest
improbability in my statement. Nor can it be supposed that the
experience of so young a man as myself would enable him to
assert so many things in utter contradiction to all that has
hitherto been felt and believed on this subject. I therefore trust
that I shall not be made responsible for every sentiment in the
book, so as to have it supposed, that any herein inserted are
my own private opinions. 15

He also hoped to dedicate the essay to Lady Frances Jerningham, such a

superior and positively pleasant person as to be living disproof of its
argument. In a letter asking for her permission for the dedication, he told
her:

Upon handling the subject I found that many points were

necessarily treated in such a manner that I being a young man
might be blamed & ridiculed if I left the least suspicion in the
minds of my readers that the thoughts here canvassed were
my own - I therefore sought to hinder any suspicion of this na-
ture by dedicating to one whose very qualities proving the
falsehood of many of the assertions, might show that I really
exposed the opinions of another - for else it would be a
manifest contradiction & absurdity for an author to insert a
complete refutation of his disquisition in the very first page -16

Lady Frances declined the honour, and the essay was eventually pub-
lished without any dedication, but Polidori presented a copy of it to Mrs
May Robberds, inscribed with verses arguing that she too demonstrated
the falsity of its conclusions. 17
The narrative frame is not only a precaution. It also provides a Swiftian
mask through which Polidori can project the irony of the paradoxical
conclusion, or the more savage irony of a passage praising the British
government for establishing the despotism under which (as he has
argued) pleasure tends to flourish:

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156 After Byron: 1816-1821

Nor are they rash or hasty in their philanthropic attempt at

bringing this nation to the highest degree of civilization, for
they feel their way by suspensions of the Habeas Corpus,
before they ask us to increase the salary of those, who show
the nation how to obtain that happiness which depends upon
the gratification of animal wants. 18
In reaction to the popular unrest about which Polidori had heard such
exciting rumours in Switzerland and Italy, Liverpool's government had
suspended habeas corpus from March 1817 to January 1818 and had
imprisoned between forty and a hundred people without trial.19 In the
dedication (to Hobhouse) of the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pil-
grimage, Byron had complained that the suspension of habeas corpus,
and a standing army, seemed to be the only benefits England had won in
the Napoleonic Wars. 20 The same point comes up in the sarcastic out-
burst of patriotism in Beppo (1817): 'I like the Habeas Corpus (when
we've got it).' 21
The oneiric 'society for the discussion of speculative subjects, som-
what in the manner of Ciceros Academy,' 22 seems to be a version of the
Norwich Philosophical Society, where Polidori read the first version of
his essay early in 1818. J.W. Robberds, the husband of May Robberds,
23
responded to Polidori's presentation with the argument that the con-
sciousness of existence was a positive pleasure; later, he helped Polidori
correct the proofs and improve his style. Robberds gives an account of
the society in his memoir of William Taylor:
Its character was more literary than scientific, and its lecture-
room afforded rather an arena to the debater than a tribune to
the professor. It never courted publicity, nor aspired to the
honour of having copies of its transactions claimed by our
national libraries. In its sphere, however, it was not useless: it
set mind at work, and promoted inquiry. Some of the papers
which it caused to be written have been thought not unworthy
of being preserved by the aid of the press, and some of the
talents which it assisted to develope have since not slumbered
in inglorious ease [Robberds cites Polidori's essay in proof of
this]. William Taylor was a constant attendant on its meetings,
where he never failed to take so prominent a part, and to infuse
into the debate so much animation and spirit, that his occa-
sional absence at any time produced a general feeling of dis-
appointment and dulness. 24
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 157

The oneiric speaker who maintains that positive pleasure depends on

the imagination appears, however, to be modelled not on any of Pol-
idori's Norwich friends, but on Byron. The essay has a close relationship
to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, especially to the third canto (towards
which Polidori felt somewhat proprietorial, since much of it had been
composed in his company)25 and the fourth (to which he had looked
forward so eagerly). The essay sometimes seems simply to imitate or
paraphrase the poem; sometimes uses it as a source of imagery or
examples; sometimes seems to comment on it; sometimes takes issue
with it. In short, the relations between the two texts are as complex and
variable as those between the two men.
Polidori's essay first displays a filial imitation of Byron's poem in its
exordium, when the speaker mock-modestly concedes that he may be
wrong, that the imagination may not be the only source of positive
pleasure:
I am liable to error; I do not therefore give my opinion on
Pleasure as a certain one; - it may be, that I alone have felt
disappointment in every pursuit - a vapid nullity in every
object. Others may have found that positive absolute Pleasure
existed in the search of virtue - others that it dwelt with vice. I
have found it in neither.26
This parallels not only the pessimism of the fourth canto of the poem, but
also the mock-modesty and mock-optimism of the third:
I have not loved the World, nor the World me, -
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, - hopes which will not deceive,
And Virtues which are merciful, nor weave
Snares for the failing; I would also deem
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve -
That two, or one, are almost what they seem, -
That Goodness is no name - and Happiness no dream.27
Byron's focus is more specifically ethical and satirical (and personal)
than Polidori's, but their common insistence on the illusory nature of
supposed goods and the similarities in their diction ('it may be,,' 'there
may be,' and so on) are striking.
In their treatment of the pleasures of art, the two works are also very
close. Novels, for example, according to the essay, 'give us pleasure by
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158 After Byron: 1816-1821

abstracting us from our own pains to the pleasures and pains of others'; 28
Byron seems to be referring obscurely to a similar process of abstraction,
or distraction, when he says that the imagination 'First exiles, then
replaces what we hate.' 29 It drives out our hateful (or painful) feelings,
and replaces them with more pleasant ones.
The essay describes the desire for fame in terms that recall Polidori's
letter to his father, written only five years earlier, describing the same
desire as the universal motivation: 'From the schoolboy reader of Livy to
the old man who can read no longer, this desire possesses the soul of all.
This influences the patriot and turn-coat, it is this acts upon the Hindoo
with three hundred millions of Gods, and upon the atheist with none.' 30
But this desire can be gratified only in imagination. The poem agrees:
'Fame... will scarce reanimate [the] clay' of those who died for it,31 so - as
the essay points out - they will scarcely be able to enjoy it in reality.32 It is
curious that the essay does not touch on the pleasures and pains of
present fame, as Byron had somewhat wryly experienced them, and
Polidori had enviously observed them, in Geneva; but Childe Harold
hardly touches on them either. The poem has a great deal to say about
Byron's fame, but only as future fame, towards which Byron affects a
laconic indifference.33 The essay ends its discussion of fame with the line
of Persius - 'Cinis, et manes, et fabula fies'34 - that Byron adapts in Don
Juan: the only result of all our striving for fame is 'To have, when the
original is dust, / A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.'35
The first time the essay draws on the imagery of Childe Harold is in its
discussion of taste, the first of the sensual pleasures it takes up in the
attempt to prove that they are all either relative or imaginary. There is
little eating or drinking in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - Don Juan will
make up for it - but one of the examples Polidori's speaker cites to prove
that the pleasures of taste are relative, that hunger and thirst are the best
'sauce piquante,'36 centres on an image recurrent in the fourth canto: a
stream polluted with blood. If Italy were 'Less lovely or more powerful,'
then 'the hostile horde / Of many-nationed spoilers' would not 'Quaff
blood and water' from the Po. At the battle of Thrasimene, 'torrents
[were] swoll'n to rivers with [Roman] gore'; a stream named Sanguinetto
still 'tells ye where the dead / Made the earth wet, and turned the
unwilling waters red.'37 The essay notes that 'Darius, when flying,
drinking water from a stream reddened by the blood of his followers,
declared that he never drank so pleasant a draught.'38 One difference, of
course, is that Darius has no other draught available, but the many-
nationed spoilers are vampires by choice.
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 159

Before its digressio on the history of civilization, the essay places a

refutatio disposing of Robberds's argument that the consciousness of
existence is itself a source of positive pleasure. The deprived savage and
the prisoner (examples of reduced but still pleasurable existence which
Robberds had apparently drawn from de Stael's Reflexions sur le sui-
cide)39 take care to prolong their lives, according to the essay, not because
of any value they place in life itself, but because of the fear of death - and
because life allows them to exercise their imaginations. The savage can
form the natural objects before him into 'innumerable combinations
which may delight his mind'; the prisoner can speculate on the future or
on immortality; he can imagine, like Boethius, that the goddess of
wisdom comes to console him; or, 'if he but find a solitary spider or
mouse within his cell, they will cause him to conjure up images of
affection and gratitude in their little breasts towards himself.'40 This
seems to draw, not on Childe Harold, but on The Prisoner of Chillon,
which was also composed when Byron and Polidori were in
Switzerland:
With spiders I had friendship made,
And watched them in their sullen trade,
Had seen the mice by moonlight play,
And why should I feel less than they?41
The first of the ways in which the essay shows the other side of its
ambivalence towards the poem - in which it tries to claim some inde-
pendence - is by a kind of critical commentary. This occurs in the
discussion of the pleasures of smell, of sight, and especially of scenery
(which the essay separates from those of sight, placing them instead with
the pleasures of the arts).42 The imagination, according to the essay,
operates on nature in three ways. All three of them are prominent in
Childe Harold, which rarely describes nature simply for its own sake.
First, the essay asks rhetorically: 'Do we not people the mountains
with fairies and dew-fed spirits? Do we not place upon the rocks the
sanctified hermits, and upon the plain the happy couple, of whose
happiness we would wish to partake, whose troubles we sympathize
with?' Byron does imagine a 'godly Eremite' on Mount Athos; and
Childe Harold, 'Like the Chaldean ... could watch the stars, / Till he had
peopled them with beings bright / As their own beams' - as, in the
fourth canto, Byron peoples the Coliseum with the ghosts of heroes, and
the Church of St Nicholas in Carcere with 'Two insulated phantoms of
the brain,' the Roman Charity and her father.43 It is revealing how little
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160 After Byron: 1816-1821

difference there is between Byron's responses to natural landscapes (or

skyscapes) and to architecture: like Polidori's speaker, he treats scenery
as one of the arts.
Second, the essay asks: 'Do we not gaze upon the ocean as the emblem
of man, always or ruffled with a breath, or torn by a storm?' The
apostrophe to the Ocean that ends the fourth canto explicitly celebrates it
as implacably inhuman, but the very act of apostrophizing it implicitly
personifies it, and the celebration of its destructive power implicitly
makes it an emblem of the Destroyer whom Byron has ostentatiously
refrained from invoking in the Coliseum. By the end of the apos-
trophe, the ocean is explicitly an emblem, the 'glorious mirror, where
the Almighty's form / Glasses itself in tempests,' and 'The image of
Eternity.' 44
Third, the essay anticipates Ruskin's analysis of the pathetic fallacy:
We often look upon scenery as if it sympathized with the
actions done there. The spot where murder sprinkled her hoary
form with the blood of a brother or a friend, often vests the
sombre hues of the pine and the heath; the grave is wept over
by the dew-dropping willow, and the ensanguined plain of
Waterloo, in imagination, is barren and desolate. 45
Polidori and Byron had both been struck by how little Waterloo looked
like a 'place of skulls.' 46 In Childe Harold, Byron exclaims, 'How that red
rain hath made the harvest grow!' His description of the forest of
Ardennes before the battle - 'Dewy with Nature's tear-drops ... / Griev-
ing, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, / Over the unreturning brave' -
invokes the pathetic fallacy only to question it.47 Perhaps his scepticism
about the outcome of Waterloo made him wary of conventional poetiz-
ing on the subject. Elsewhere - for example, in his account of the
earthquake at the battle of Thrasimene - Byron exploits the fallacy he
questions at Waterloo: 'The Earth to them was as a rolling bark / Which
bore them to Eternity.' 48
At points, the essay moves beyond such detached commentary to take
issue with the poem; it moves beyond the assertion of independence
from the parent text to an Oedipal rebellion against it, an attempt to
displace it. At these points, Polidori's speaker is more Byronic than
Byron himself. Specifically, the essay is more pessimistic than Childe
Harold; or, as it might be more accurate to stay, it presents the poem's
pessimism more consistently, without the moments of courage and
tenderness - or lapses into sentimentality - with which Byron moderates
it. The poem, after all, is not an essay, and typically creates its meanings
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 161

by shifting between positions, rather than by adhering to any one of

them.49
This Oedipal struggle is most clearly revealed in the two works'
treatment of women, and especially of mothers. The essay's reflections
on the love of women are conventional, but conventionally cynical; they
are also distinguished with particular clarity from Polidori's own senti-
ments. The speaker quotes Polidori's sentimental poem 'On Woman' -
'Oh! in the name of woman's bound / All that below of joy is found'50 -
only to comment:
though we may listen to the poet ... we cannot believe him, for
the number of her follies is so great, her caprices so various,
that from reason as well as experience, we might argue in this
case as well [as] every other, that happiness is not a reality but
a vision.51
This corresponds to one (though only one) strain running through Childe
Harold, from the first canto - 'Oh! many a time and oft, had Harold loved,
/ Or dreamed he loved, since Rapture is a dream' - to the fourth:
Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art -
An unseen Seraph, we believe in thee, -
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart, -
But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see
The naked eye, thy form, as it should be;
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled Heaven,
Even with its own desiring phantasy,
And to a thought such shape and image given,
As haunts the unquenched soul - parched - wearied -
wrung - and riven.52
But the essay is more worldly, as well as more explicitly misogynistic,
than Childe Harold is. It does not lay the blame on love in the abstract, but
on the shortcomings of women and the discontents of everyday life:
We think that talents will give us pleasure, forgetting that a
mother, a regulator of the household affairs of a family,
can no longer waste her time in playing sonatas or writing
sonnets ...
The essay also makes the curiously anti-Byronic point that the rarity of
incest proves that love is imaginary:
How seldom is it, that we hear of first cousins; how much more
anomalous of brothers and sisters falling in love with one
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162 After Byron: 1816-1821

another: and does not this arise from their seeing too closely, so
that the imagination, trying to act, finds its way clogged by all
those petty obstacles of frailties and weaknesses, which are
exposed by intimacy. 53
But just as Polidori's poem 'On Woman' contradicts the misogyny of the
essay, so Ernestus Berchtold, his narrative of incest, endorses precisely
the idealizing love that the essay and Childe Harold expose as an illusion.
Childe Harold consistently treats motherhood and childhood with a
sentimentality unrelieved even by misanthropy, from the opening dedi-
cation to 'Ianthe,' the eleven-year-old Lady Charlotte Harley, and the
vignette of motherhood in the harem with which Byron discreetly re-
placed a reference to Albanian homosexuality in the second canto, to the
fantasy of the Roman Charity and the elegy for Princess Charlotte, dead
in childbirth, in the fourth.54 The third canto contains the embarrassed
announcement that Childe Harold 'had learned to love, - I know not
why, / For this in such as him seems strange of mood, - / The helpless
looks of blooming Infancy.' It also both begins and ends with apos-
trophes to Byron's daughter Ada, whom her father had not seen since
she was five weeks old, and was never to see again. In the closing
apostrophe, he regrets the pleasures he will miss:

To aid thy mind's developement, - to watch

Thy dawn of little joys, - to sit and see
Almost thy very growth, - to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects, - wonders yet to thee!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss, -
This, it should seem, was not reserved for me -
Yet this was in my nature: - as it is,
I know not what is there, yet something like to this. 55
Byron is indulging in precisely the sort of imaginary pleasure Pol-
idori's speaker analyses: children, he says,
are indeed subjects, speculating upon whose future prospects
we may pass, in fact, some happy hours, and picture, in imag-
ination, some happy years; but cannot he who has none, spec-
ulate, and enjoy all the happiness of a father who has many?
Since Byron was separated from his first daughter by his self-imposed
exile, and since his second daughter spent most of her short life in a
convent, he might as well, for practical purposes, have had none. He
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 163

certainly contrived - however regretfully - to miss the hazards of parent-

hood, to which the essay devotes particular emphasis:

Children are generally considered to be synonymous with

blessings: - but what are they except causes of vexation and
trouble, tormenting us with their cries when in swaddling-
clothes, with their obstinacy and stupidity when breeched, and
with their follies and vices when men?56

These jaundiced comments on the imaginary pleasures of parenthood

constitute the essay's sharpest critique of Childe Harold.57
Parenthood is an earthly form of immortality. Childe Harold is typ-
ically inconsistent in its treatment of the heavenly form; the essay,
typically, follows one strain in the poem so rigorously as to criticize the
other. Byron is sceptical not only about the likelihood, but also about the
desirability of immortality. He not only applies to the subject Socrates's
aphorism 'All that we know is, nothing can be known,' but even hopes
that after death 'no forced banquet claims the sated guest, / But Silence
spreads the couch of ever welcome Rest.'58 The essay argues that the
imagination of an eternal life is 'perhaps the greatest [source] of pleasure
that man has ever found,'59 but that any pleasure we can imagine would
inevitably sate us, become a forced banquet, if prolonged eternally.
These sceptical and mortalist sentiments tended to provoke an op-
posite reaction in Byron. He followed the stanza I have just quoted from
with the pious hope that 'as holiest men have deemed,' there might be 'A
land of Souls beyond that sable shore,' where we would be reunited with
our loved ones.60 He did so at the request of the pious R.C. Dallas; but in
the third canto, when he had left Dallas far behind, he still followed an
encomium on Gibbon (for 'Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer')
with a stanza alluding to 'our trust' in a resurrection.61 In the same canto,
under the influence of Shelley, and through Shelley of Wordsworth, he
indulged in a pantheistic vision of immortality:
And when, at length, the mind shall be all free
From what it hates in this degraded form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm, -
When Elements to Elements conform,
And dust is as it should be, shall I not
Feel all I see less dazzling but more warm?
The bodiless thought? the Spirit of each spot?
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?62
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164 After Byron: 1816-1821

The essay quotes Gustavus's very similar vision from Ximenes, but
changes its phrasing to make it an expression of despair rather than of
hope:
What though our
Soul 'scape from its corpse,
And big with joy fly basking to the sun,
As if it had forgot this earth and grief?
What though it feel as if it entered all,
Though identical? What though vision seem
To reach farther than the sun's rays, and pierce
What sends them back; though quicken'd hearing catch
The sounds of the most distant volving spheres
Mingling in harmony. -
What though our soul gambol with human pride
In the seven-fold rays, 'cause it may seem
As if they sought to mingle with that beam
Of Godhead forming us.
Still, even these sensations would be dull before the millions of
millions of years should have elapsed, that would bring us to
the portal of eternity. 63
Gustavus is of course, like the speaker of the essay, a dramatic creation;
his views on immortality need be no more like Polidori's own than the
speaker's are. But The Fall of the Angels (see chapter 19), and Polidori's
repeated if half- hearted attempts to enter the Church (see chapter 16),
suggest that (as in the case of love) he personally, like Byron, entertained
some ambivalence towards the subject.
The essay's account of the French Revolution, in its historical digressio,
is also more pessimistic than the poem's treatment of the same events,
but in this case the essay is less, rather than more, consistent than the
poem. In fact, the essay is so ambivalent, ironic, and abstract that it is
difficult to follow: 'all Europe seemed to be leaving its happy state' of
indolence under tyranny, 'and startled many by an apparent eagerness
to realize its imaginations,' its Utopian visions of liberty and equality.
France was the first to raise the 'cry of liberty,' but also, 'when the
senseless shouts of her mob were silenced by the better sense of the
experienced part of the community,' the first to submit again to des-
potism under Napoleon. Napoleon's 'despotic impatience,' however,
'was almost the cause of that troublesome cry being again raised,' as his
wars of conquest provoked local movements of resistance (like the Swiss
one Polidori would celebrate in Ernestus Berchtold and the Italian one
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 165

whose successors he had wanted to join); 'but then, like ministering

angels, our ministry interfered, and ... restored that despotism, which,
like Argus, has an hundred eyes for the happiness of its subjects.'64
The reflections scattered through Childe Harold do show some of the
same ambivalence. France under Napoleon aroused all Europe: he
shook its rulers 'from their slumbers on the throne; / Too glorious, were
this all his mighty arm had done.' But he could not be content with this:
he 'would be all or nothing - nor could wait / For the sure grave to level
him.' So tyranny was restored: 'Fit retribution! Gaul may champ the
65
bit / And foam in fetters; - but is Earth more free?' Byron employs in this
context the vampire imagery that he had already passed on to Polidori:
'France got drunk with blood to vomit crime.' As I have mentioned, the
essay imitates Byron's sarcastic praise of the British government for
suspending habeas corpus. It also takes up Byron's suggestion that
freedom survives only in America.66
But Byron's account, though it is not continuous - and was, in fact,
written over a period of years, while some of the events it deals with
were still going on - is considerably more lucid than the essay's. And for
all its ambivalences, it never abandons revolutionary hope in favour of
reactionary disillusionment: 'Shall we, who struck the Lion down, shall
we / Pay the Wolf homage?'67 In this instance, the essay seems to have
departed from Childe Harold in order to express Polidori's own hatred of
the oppressors of Italy - which included nearly everyone. The political
and personal have overruled the literary and philosophical.
Polidori's attempt to deflect criticism by disowning the argument of
the essay did not succeed. The response to it was both severe and
personal. Lady Frances Jerningham refused the dedication:
I do not approve the principle, & think you argue wrongly on
it - & if you were right I should be very sorry to assist in
depriving any one, of the more pleasurable belief in real &
substantial happiness - There is also some thing unpleasant in
being named in a dedication to an 'Essay on pleasure[.'] I think
there would be a want of delicacy, in feeling comfortable in such
a situation -

And she went on:

I regret you are still blowing bubbles, & building Castles - I
cannot at all comprehend, how any man can be unoccupied,
uninterested, & unhappy, whilst he has parents, friends Books &
the country & the town to range at will - How we spurn from
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166 After Byron: 1816-1821

us every charm, when we let the present pass, to look after the
ambitious future!!68

Gaetano addressed a stern verse epistle to his son:

John, why do you go wandering far from the truth

With your mind? Why do you plant with thorns
The path you will have to follow?
Study the doctrines of the philosophers:
Read Marcus Aurelius, Plato, and Epictetus
And you will put an end to your vain thinking.
Do not make a bad use of your intellect,
And if heaven has given you some talents,
Do not leave them in a neglected corner ...69

And a 'Lady of Yarmouth' was heard to exclaim, 'what a Tyger of a man

he must be.' 70
The review in the Literary Gazette - a periodical published by Henry
Colburn, who had published Glenarvon and would shortly publish The
Vampyre - took a jocular approach: 'Ah, Dr. Polidori, though thy name
have a foreign sound, thy temper is genuine John Bull, and were such
flippancy not unworthy of a philosophical treatise, we should applaud
thee as an able grumbler.' It quoted a long critique by a correspondent,
who was more solemn: 'where is the wretch so dead to all that is
elevating, to all that is ennobling in the mind of man, as to possess a
single chord in unison with such detestable anti-social and unnatural
doctrines?' The review lightened this tone, however, by repeatedly
interjecting, 'Poor Dr. P!'71
Reviewers did notice the essay's close relation to Childe Harold, which
of course was itself censured for its 'contempt of all the ordinary pursuits
of life,' its 'strain of dissatisfaction and despondency,' and its 'cold and
sceptical philosophy' - the phrases are from Scott's review of the fourth
canto. 72 They mostly did not, however, appreciate the ironic and critical
aspects of that relation. (One possible exception is the reviewer for the
Gentleman's Magazine, also the most indulgent of the essay's critics, who
described Polidori as 'a writer of strong mind and powerful talents; but
delighting in play, more than work; therefore not doing justice to his real
pretensions.') 73
The Monthly Review regretted the fashion for pessimism:

It is impossible not to speak strongly concerning that evil cause

which has rendered useless to their fellow-creatures, and tor-
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An Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure 167

menting to themselves, a certain portion of noble minds; and

which has afforded an opportunity to so many paltry imitators
to claim the attributes of genius, under the disguise of an un-
happy quality which has blighted the honours of some few of
its children.74
That the reviewer had Byron in mind as the object of Polidori's paltry
imitation would be obvious even without the keyword noble. Some
verses addressed to Polidori, and published in the Norfolk Chronicle,
made the point explicit; they also drew attention to the essay's am-
bivalence and to its exaggeration of the poem's pessimism:
When gifted Harold left his ruin'd home
With mourning lyre through classic fields to roam,
When He, the Giant-Genius stalk'd abroad,
Blasting the flowers that blossom'd o'er his road;
Confess'd no joy in hope, no light in life,
But all was darkness, vanity and strife;
Yet would his better feelings sometimes move
That icy bosom with one touch of love:
None could like him in glowing verse 'essay
'To fix the spark of Beauty's heavenly ray';
None could like him so warmly, deeply feel,
How female softness moulds a heart of steel.
But Thou, weak follower of a soul-less school,
Whose stoic feelings vacillate by rule,
Doom'd through a joyless wilderness to rove,
Un-cheer'd by friendship and unwarm'd by love,
Dull, satiate spirit - ere thy prime's begun
Accurs't with hating that thou canst not shun,
Man shall despise thee for thy vain attempt
And Woman spurn thee with deserv'd contempt,
Thy pride of apathy, thy folly see,
And what they hate in Harold - loathe in thee.75
The verses do not only underline the outcome of the Oedipal struggle
between the poet and the essayist (at this particular crossroads, Laius
had won handily). They also foreshadow, with uncanny accuracy, the
rest of Polidori's literary career.

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