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.

LRB 30 August 1990 | PDF Download