Byron and Oriental Love GERARD COHEN-VRIGNAUD G eorge Eliot’s heroine in Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) faces one of those mar- riage choices quintessential to the nineteenth century, between the pleasure principle of artistic fancy and the reality principle of moral life. Incarnated by her two wooing lovers, Harold Transome and the titular radical, these antipodes reflect the Victorian elevation of Wordsworthian high seriousness over Byronic transgression. 1 As Andrew Elfenbein has noted, ‘‘re- jecting Byron became an essential ritual of the career of the Victorian author.’’ 2 In Felix Holt, this authorial ritual is realized through the aesthetic education of Esther Lyon, who must leave behind the childish things of Byron’s poetry. By learning to depreciate the ‘‘Byronic-bilious style,’’ Esther begins to grasp how her ‘‘favourite Byronic heroes ... look something like last night’s decorations seen in the sober dawn.’’ 3 Given the novel’s Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 68, No. 1, pp. 1–32, ISSN: 0891–9356, online ISSN: 1067– 8352,  2013 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm. DOI: ncl.2013.68.1.1. 1 Of course, these Victorian caricatures of William Wordsworth and George Gor- don, Lord Byron, do not account for Wordsworth’s whimsy (in particular, the ballads of Lyrical Ballads [1798]) or Byronic moral sobriety (say, Manfred [1817]). 2 Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), p. 88. On this dynamic in Eliot in particular, see also Edward Dramin, ‘‘‘A New Unfolding of Life’: Romanticism in the Late Novels of George Eliot,’’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 26 (1998), 273–302. 3 George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 221, 197. Further references are to this edition and appear in the text. 1 This content downloaded from 160.36.192.221 on Tue, 9 Jul 2013 04:55:59 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions