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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Manfred," Lord Byron intricately weaves a tale of a tormented nobleman grappling with overwhelming guilt and existential despair. This dramatic poem employs a blend of Gothic elements and Romantic sensibilities, encapsulated in Manfred's soliloquies that explore themes of self-identity, isolation, and the quest for redemption. Byron's lush and evocative language elevates the narrative, emphasizing the interplay between nature and the human soul, while the structure—reflective of both verse drama and lyrical poetry—offers a unique reading experience steeped in emotion and philosophical inquiry. Lord Byron, renowned as one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, infused his personal experiences and turbulent life into his works. Often seen as a flawed genius himself, his encounters with love, loss, and the pursuit of freedom deeply informed his writing. "Manfred" was penned during a period of personal upheaval for Byron, drawing on his own struggles with societal expectations, isolation, and the dark undercurrents of human ambition. This backdrop enriches the poem, making it a poignant reflection of his internal conflicts. For readers seeking a profound exploration of the human psyche and a rich tapestry of Romantic ideals, "Manfred" is an essential addition to the literary canon. Byron's masterful command of verse and his deep psychological insights create a compelling narrative that resonates with themes of anguish and transcendence. This work invites readers into a world where the struggles of the heart and mind remain timeless. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Manfred
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection pairs Lord Byron’s Manfred with John Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron to bring the dramatic poem into conversation with a contemporary narrative of its author’s public image. The aim is not to reduce art to life, but to stage an encounter between a self-haunted protagonist and a life-story that helped shape the idea of a “Byronic” personality. Combining these works illuminates how Romantic self-fashioning operates across genres, revealing correspondences between imagined interiority and historical persona. Presented together, they invite sustained reflection on the mutual refracting of myth and maker, and on the ethical stakes of that proximity.
The thematic through-line uniting these selections is the Romantic interrogation of selfhood, agency, and accountability before human and metaphysical orders. Manfred, a dramatic poem, articulates a solitary resistance to external authority and a desire for knowledge beyond sanctioned bounds. The Life of Lord Byron, a biography by John Galt, traces the formation of a public character whose notoriety and charisma shaped responses to Byron’s works. Together they explore how interior drama and public narrative construct the figure now called the Byronic hero, linking imaginative transgression, remorse, and defiance with the lived pressures and performances that accompany literary fame.
Our aim is to foreground a motif rather than a chronology: the making and unmaking of a self in the crucible of desire, conscience, and public gaze. Manfred offers an intensified theater of inwardness; Galt’s account situates Byron’s presence within the social circuits that received and contested his art. Read in concert, the works trace an arc from private invocation to public reputation, clarifying how language, conduct, and reception cohere into a cultural persona. The combination encourages readers to detect echoes between utterance and image, while holding open necessary distinctions between imagined experience and the record of a life.
This pairing also differs from encountering either work alone. Rather than isolating poem or biography, the arrangement frames each as a commentary on the other’s limits. Manfred resists moral closure and institutional authority; Galt’s narrative resists the temptation to treat artistic utterance as transparent confession. The juxtaposition complicates reductive identifications while testing productive affinities. It offers a focused constellation through which to examine Romantic self-fashioning without presuming direct equivalence between protagonist and author. The result is a more capacious view of the Byronic phenomenon, attentive to tensions between invention, reputation, and the demands of public scrutiny.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
The dialogue between the texts emerges first in their shared preoccupation with solitude and self-judgment. In Manfred, solitude becomes a crucible for address, as language confronts forces beyond human sanction. In The Life of Lord Byron, solitude appears as a social phenomenon, the distance a notorious figure maintains from, and against, the gaze of society. Both works ask what counts as authority when conscience refuses external arbitration, and how speech becomes action. The poem dramatizes that refusal; the biography records the pressures exerted when such stances meet public curiosity, admiration, resentment, and the theater of reputation.
Contrast sharpens the conversation. Manfred’s dramatic mode condenses perception into incantatory exchanges, where imagery and rhythm intensify philosophical conflict. Galt’s prose offers a steadier pace, unfolding Byron’s conduct and milieu with an observational temper that invites inference rather than performance. The poem’s heightened utterance seeks an absolute answer that may not exist; the biography traces partial explanations amid contingencies. This tonal divergence creates a productive tension: one text embodies the allure of unyielding will, the other surveys the costs and contradictions that accompany a life shaped by that ideal. Each corrects and amplifies the other’s claims.
Recurring motifs echo across both works. The grandeur and peril of nature, the allure of forbidden knowledge, and the persistence of remorse form a triad that structures the poem’s drama and shadows the life narrative. Manfred frames knowledge as invocation; Galt treats knowledge as testimony, assembling observations that resist sensational confession. In each, speech functions as an ethical trial: oaths, vows, and judgments articulate competing claims on responsibility. The implicit question is not factual disclosure but the measure of self-mastery. Through this shared vocabulary, the texts disclose how aspiration and accountability remain in uneasy alignment throughout Byron’s creative presence.
The connection becomes explicit in how each text frames persona. Manfred crystallizes traits associated with the Byronic figure: proud isolation, imaginative audacity, impatience with external judgment. The Life of Lord Byron interprets Byron’s conduct and writings within a public sphere that recognized and contested those traits. Without claiming identity between author and character, Galt’s portrait registers how Byron’s creations nourished a recognizably Byronic pattern of response. In turn, the poem reads differently when encountered alongside a narrative that tracks the making of that pattern, allowing resonance without collapsing difference between art and life.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The collection remains vital because it invites reflection on autonomy, culpability, and fame—questions that animate contemporary discourse about identity and responsibility. Manfred stages the drama of a will that refuses external adjudication, while The Life of Lord Byron examines how such a stance plays out within social visibility. Read together, they model how art and reputation co-create cultural meaning. This dual emphasis helps readers think about charisma, transgression, and remorse without romanticizing or condemning by reflex. The combination encourages nuanced attention to the limits of self-determination and to the consequences of turning inner necessity into public posture.
A widely recognized milestone in literary discourse is the emergence of the term “Byronic hero,” for which Manfred is a central point of reference. The figure’s mixture of pride, secrecy, estrangement, and moral intensity has influenced expectations about Romantic character and authorial persona. Galt’s biography contributes to that discourse by tracing how Byron’s life became a site of fascination and debate, reinforcing and complicating the type. The pairing thus situates a key imaginative construct alongside a narrative that chronicles its public uptake, enabling a balanced view of how cultural categories form through the interplay of texts and lives.
Beyond scholarship, both works have enjoyed a broad afterlife across performance, debate, and cultural commentary. The poem’s dramatic architecture has invited staging and interpretation in multiple arts, while the biography’s portrait of notoriety has supplied a template for discussions of celebrity and authorship. Together, they have seeded idioms and archetypes that reappear whenever culture revisits the allure and cost of charisma. Their persistence underscores how narratives of defiance and accountability continue to organize public imagination, shaping conversations about artistic integrity, scandal, privacy, and the hunger for figures who transgress while insisting on their own code.
The collection also invites a reflective approach to biography itself. By placing a dramatic self-portrait adjacent to a life narrative, readers can test assumptions about influence, causation, and exemplarity without collapsing distinctions. The arrangement acknowledges the risks of overidentification while recognizing the interpretive energy generated by perceived affinities. It encourages critical habits that value evidence, patience, and proportion, keeping imaginative sympathy in dialogue with principled restraint. In this balance lies the contemporary relevance of Manfred and The Life of Lord Byron: a sustained exercise in understanding how art and life illuminate, limit, and sometimes redeem each other.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
After the collapse of Napoleonic rule, the Congress of Vienna sought to restore monarchical stability across Europe. Police networks, passport systems, and a wary diplomacy shadowed the movements of elite travelers. In this climate, Manfred emerges from the high Alps, a space that seems beyond jurisdiction yet is patrolled by the political mood of restoration. The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt chronicles a nobleman whose itinerancy tested borders both literal and moral. The conservative settlement promised order, but its anxieties amplified the allure of defiant selfhood. Byron's cosmopolitan exile and Galt's near-contemporary record both register the pressures of that settlement.
During the British Regency, executive power clustered around court and cabinet while Parliament polarized between entrenched ministries and vociferous reformers. As a hereditary peer, Byron entered the House of Lords and tasted the rituals of power, even as he distrusted its complacencies. Manfred's inward sovereignty parallels a period when liberty and hierarchy contended in speeches, clubs, and the streets. Galt's biography tracks the contradictions of an aristocrat sympathetic to dissent, noting how noble status granted a platform yet provoked suspicion. The interplay of privilege and critique situates both works within debates about representation, responsibility, and the reach of governmental authority.
Britain's rapid industrialization sharpened inequalities and sparked unrest in textile districts and urban centers. Protective tariffs and food prices inflamed crowds; emergency legislation armed magistrates; and the legal system prosecuted collective protest with severity. Byron's public interventions, especially on behalf of distressed workers, belong to this environment of anxiety and punitive order. The persona that shadows Manfred—aloof, wounded, unbending—finds one source in such confrontations between conscience and coercion. Galt reconstructs these pressures through dates, speeches, and travels, suggesting how political tempests complicated artistic labor. The tension between elite responsibility and popular grievance haunts the background of both volumes.
Religious revival and moral reform societies energized debates about blasphemy, theatre, and the authority of scripture. Although Manfred invokes powers beyond the human, its skepticism toward external judgment risked official rebuke and prudential self-censorship. The drama's preference for the page over the stage reflects an environment where licensing and prosecution could shape artistic form. Galt's Life measures how controversies over personal conduct and doctrinal orthodoxy fused in public appraisal, transforming literary choices into moral indictments. Together, the works inhabit a Britain where salvation and scandal were public currencies, and where artists navigated the narrow passage between conscience and censure.
The age also witnessed the reawakening of nationalist causes, not least in the eastern Mediterranean. Byron's decision to commit resources and reputation to a distant struggle turned a poetic celebrity into a political symbol. The last chapter of his life, as Galt records, unfolded amid negotiations, illness, and military uncertainty, connecting London drawing rooms to provincial towns under imperial rule. Manfred, set far from battlefields, nonetheless voices the insistence on self-determined will that animated such campaigns. The poem's Alpine borderlands mirror a Europe crisscrossed by new loyalties and old empires, where the language of freedom could inspire, divide, and demand sacrifice.
An expanding print marketplace transformed authors into spectacles and readers into jurors. Private life became a public commodity, with pamphlets, engravings, and gossip shaping reputations overnight. Byron's self-imposed exile after scandal, and his relocation to Switzerland and beyond, inflected the solitude that saturates Manfred. Galt writes under the burden and opportunity of this publicity, sifting testimony while aware that any portrait would be measured against rumor. The political economy of attention—subscriptions, piracies, and legal threats—frames both texts: a dramatic poem that wrestles with solitude and a biography that must navigate the noisy marketplace whose judgments it also records.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Manfred concentrates a generation's fascination with the sublime, interiority, and the sovereign imagination. Its protagonist embodies the figure later labeled the Byronic hero: proud, restless, scarred by an undeclared transgression, and determined to answer only to an inner law. The drama organizes Alpine space into a theater of mind, where cliffs, chasms, and stars become partners in thought. John Galt's Life meets this mythmaking with a method at once admiring and corrective, assembling documents that trace how persona intersects with history. The tension between the self as legend and the self as ledger shapes both the poem and the biography.
The period cherished ruins, nocturnal vistas, and supernatural inquiry, yet it was also an age of skepticism. Manfred stages this duality: invocations, rites, and apparitions are met by a will that refuses transaction with any external power. The effect is not credulity but a rigorous testing of the claims of metaphysics, tradition, and consolation. Galt's biography, committed to character rather than phantasm, situates such imaginative ventures within daily life, travel, and conversation. Both works thus inhabit a cultural space where Gothic atmospheres could coexist with philosophical disenchantment, producing art that used the supernatural to probe the limits of authority.
New sciences altered how nature was perceived and written. Geology unsettled chronologies; electricity and magnetism promised unseen forces; mountaineering and glacier observation made the Alps a laboratory of modernity. The unusual weather following a vast volcanic eruption at the decade's start marked the skies and imaginations of Europe. Manfred turns these materials into a poetics of matter and mind, viewing precipice and storm as more than scenery. Galt, attentive to libraries and conversations, notes an author receptive to such currents without becoming their disciple. The result is a pairing that filters scientific novelty through ethical, aesthetic, and existential questions.
Travel writing and linguistic curiosity widened horizons, challenging provincial assumptions while sometimes repeating them. Byron's journeys across Mediterranean and Balkan routes furnished a repertoire of scenes, idioms, and political contrasts. Even though Manfred remains set in Switzerland, it bears the stamp of an itinerant who understood borders as porous and identities as negotiated. Galt, himself experienced in commerce and travel, approaches biography as a cartography of encounters—ports, salons, monasteries, consulates—through which character is drawn. The cosmopolitan frame makes both texts sensitive to mediation, translation, and misrecognition, reminding readers that insight often travels with the baggage of its era.
Manfred belongs to the tradition of poetic drama that often avoided the commercial stage. Licensing regimes, managerial priorities, and the tastes of crowded playhouses had long shaped dramaturgy, but Byron's work resists reduction to spectacle. Its conflicts are verbal, metaphysical, and topographical, favoring the reader's imagination over the actor's gestures. Galt comments on the professionalization of authorship and the risks of writing outside dominant markets. The tension between elite experiment and popular entertainment becomes a historical datum, not a value judgment, clarifying how form and distribution interact. The poem's austerity is thus inseparable from an economy of cultural production.
The era's reviewing culture could reward, browbeat, or bury a book within weeks. Authors answered with prefaces, revisions, and cultivated circles of allies and correspondents. Galt's biography exemplifies another path: the compilation of letters, testimonies, and dated events to anchor interpretation in a documentary base. This documentary impulse converses with Manfred's refusal to annotate its secrets. One text gathers evidence to stabilize meaning; the other preserves enigma to demand rereading. Together they reflect a moment when archives and aura competed to define literary value, and when the public learned to weigh both witness and mystery in its judgments.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
From the beginning, responses polarized between admiration for audacity and alarm at impiety. Manfred was read as confession, provocation, or philosophical fable, depending on the reviewer. Galt's Life, appearing not long after the author's death, supplied a framework for reconciling art with conduct, offering chronology against rumor while sustaining the fascination. As the nineteenth century advanced, pedagogical and religious institutions filtered both works through moral lenses, praising energy while prescribing restraint. The biography became a touchstone for readers seeking a stable portrait; the poem, a test case for debates about the rights and duties of creative freedom.
Later generations attached Byron's name to liberal causes and to the romance of travel. Journeys to Alpine sites associated with Manfred added a quasi-pilgrimage dimension to reading, blending tourism with textual reverence. Galt's biography, reissued and excerpted, helped codify the itinerary of a life that could be narrated as both cautionary and exemplary. In political culture, the image of indomitable will served patriotic, reformist, and sometimes reactionary ends, a flexibility that guaranteed endurance but also controversy. The works' mobility across registers—literary, political, commercial—ensured that they would be reshelved as each generation redefined what freedom should look like.
The catastrophes of the twentieth century recast Manfred's solitude and defiance. Readers who had witnessed mechanized slaughter and displacement found in its mountain dialogues a vocabulary of alienation, responsibility, and refusal to submit. Psychological theories supplied new languages for trauma and desire, encouraging interpretations that treated the drama as a study of conscience under pressure. Galt's biography, once valued chiefly as chronicle, became a quarry for contexts: dates, places, and decisions that might explain temperament without reducing it. In classrooms and essays, the juxtaposition of poem and life invited questions about whether biography illuminates art or distracts from it.
More recent criticism has reconsidered the politics of travel and the ethics of representation that surround both texts. Manfred's Alpine sublime attracts environmental readings attentive to glaciers, forests, and human limits; Galt's framing of journeys and causes is mined for its assumptions about civilization, commerce, and cultural hierarchy. Gendered interpretations revisit the performance of masculinity in defiance and solitude, noting how the rhetoric of independence can mask dependency on privilege. Transnational scholars re-situate the final years recorded by Galt within overlapping sovereignties and contested identities. These approaches complicate heroism without denying it, anchoring admiration in informed, ethical scrutiny.
Adaptation has kept both works in circulation, from staged readings and orchestral programs to broadcast dramatizations and academic editions. Editors trace textual variants; historians annotate journeys; digital archives align timelines and landscapes. Such labors have shifted emphasis from scandal to structure, from gossip to genre. Yet debate continues. Should Manfred be read as allegory, confession, or thought experiment? Does Galt's proximity to events guarantee accuracy or encode partisanship? The contemporary consensus is provisional: that the poem and the biography are companions in inquiry, each correcting and enlarging the other, and together mapping the modern imagination's uneasy hunger for freedom.
Synopsis (Selection)
Manfred
A dramatic poem set amid Alpine heights, it follows a haunted noble who summons elemental powers to blot out a secret, unnameable guilt. His quest drives him through confrontations with supernatural and worldly authorities, testing the limits of power, penitence, and self-determination. The tone is Gothic and introspective, crystallizing the defiant solitude of the Byronic hero.
The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt
A biographical narrative that traces Byron’s upbringing, travels, literary ascent, and public controversies. Galt assembles anecdotes, observations, and contemporary reactions to portray Byron’s temperament and the forces that shaped his career. The perspective blends admiration with critique, presenting a period-minded portrait that links the poet’s fame to his restless character and self-fashioning.
Manfred and The Life of Lord Byron: Thematic Conversation
Read together, the biography contextualizes the poem’s rebellious solitude and sublime settings within the poet’s lived experiences and cultivated public image.
Both works probe guilt, autonomy, and reputation—the poem internalizes these as metaphysical struggle, while the biography externalizes them as social and historical pressures.
The result is a dialogue between myth and life that shows how the Byronic hero emerges at the intersection of personal torment, public scrutiny, and Romantic spectacle.
Manfred
Manfred
Hamlet, Act i. Scene 5, Lines 166, 167.
[Manfred, a choral tragedy in three acts, was performed at Covent Garden Theatre, October 29-November 14, 1834 [Denvil (afterwards known as "Manfred" Denvil) took the part of "Manfred," and Miss Ellen Tree (afterwards Mrs. Charles Kean) played "The Witch of the Alps"]; at Drury Lane Theatre, October 10, 1863-64 [Phelps played "Manfred," Miss Rosa Le Clercq "The Phantom of Astarte," and Miss Heath "The Witch of the Alps"]; at the Prince's Theatre, Manchester, March 27-April 20, 1867 [Charles Calvert played "Manfred"]; and again, in 1867, under the same management, at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool; and at the Princess's Theatre Royal, London, August 16, 1873 [Charles Dillon played "Manfred;" music by Sir Henry Bishop, as in 1834].
Overtures, etc.
"Music to Byron's Manfred" (overture and incidental music and choruses), by R. Schumann, 1850.
"Incidental Music," composed, in 1897, by Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (at the request of Sir Henry Irving); heard (in part only) at a concert in Queen's Hall, May, 1899.
"Manfred Symphony" (four tableaux after the Poem by Byron), composed by Tschaikowsky, 1885; first heard in London, autumn, 1898.]
INTRODUCTION TO MANFRED
Byron passed four months and three weeks in Switzerland. He arrived at the Hôtel d'Angleterre at Sécheron, on Saturday, May 25, and he left the Campagne Diodati for Italy on Sunday, October 6, 1816. Within that period he wrote the greater part of the Third Canto of Childe Harold, he began and finished the Prisoner of Chillon, its seven attendant poems, and the Monody on the death of Sheridan, and he began Manfred.
A note to the "Incantation" (Manfred, act i. sc. 1, lines 192-261), which was begun in July and published together with the Prisoner of Chillon, December 5, 1816, records the existence of "an unfinished Witch Drama" (First Edition, p. 46); but, apart from this, the first announcement of his new work is contained in a letter to Murray, dated Venice, February 15, 1817 (Letters, 1900, iv. 52). "I forgot," he writes, "to mention to you that a kind of Poem in dialogue (in blank verse) or drama ... begun last summer in Switzerland, is finished; it is in three acts; but of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind." The letter is imperfect, but some pages of "extracts" which were forwarded under the same cover have been preserved. Ten days later (February 25) he reverts to these "extracts," and on February 28 he despatches a fair copy of the first act. On March 9 he remits the third and final act of his "dramatic poem" (a definition adopted as a second title), but under reserve as to publication, and with a strict injunction to Murray "to submit it to Mr. G[ifford] and to whomsoever you please besides." It is certain that this third act was written at Venice (Letter to Murray, April 14), and it may be taken for granted that the composition of the first two acts belongs to the tour in the Bernese Alps (September 17-29), or to the last days at Diodati (September 30 to October 5, 1816), when the estro (see Letter to Murray, January 2, 1817) was upon him, when his "Passions slept," and, in spite of all that had come and gone and could not go, his spirit was uplifted by the "majesty and the power and the glory" of Nature.
Gifford's verdict on the first act was that it was "wonderfully poetical" and "merited publication," but, as Byron had foreseen, he did not "by any means like" the third act. It was, as its author admitted (Letter to Murray, April 14) "damnably bad," and savoured of the "dregs of a fever," for which the Carnival (Letter to Murray, February 28) or, more probably, the climate and insanitary "palaces" of Venice were responsible. Some weeks went by before there was either leisure or inclination for the task of correction, but at Rome the estro returned in full force, and on May 5 a "new third act of Manfred—the greater part rewritten," was sent by post to England. Manfred, a Dramatic Poem, was published June 16, 1817.
Manfred was criticized by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review (No. lvi., August, 1817, vol. 28, pp. 418-431), and by John Wilson in the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (afterwards Blackwood's, etc.) (June, 1817, i. 289-295). Jeffrey, as Byron remarked (Letter to Murray, October 12, 1817), was "very kind," and Wilson, whose article "had all the air of being a poet's," was eloquent in its praises. But there was a fly in the ointment. "A suggestion" had been thrown out, "in an ingenious paper in a late number of the Edinburgh Magazine [signed H. M. (John Wilson), July, 1817], that the general conception of this piece, and much of what is excellent in the manner of its execution, have been borrowed from the Tragical History of Dr. Faustus of Marlow (sic);" and from this contention Jeffrey dissented. A note to a second paper on Marlowe's Edward II. (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, October, 1817) offered explanations, and echoed Jeffrey's exaltation of Manfred above Dr. Faustus; but the mischief had been done. Byron was evidently perplexed and distressed, not by the papers in Blackwood, which he never saw, but by Jeffrey's remonstrance in his favour; and in the letter of October 12 he is at pains to trace the "evolution" of Manfred. "I never read," he writes, "and do not know that I ever saw the Faustus of Marlow;" and, again, "As to the Faustus of Marlow, I never read, never saw, nor heard of it." "I heard Mr. Lewis translate verbally some scenes of Goethe's Faust ... last summer" (see, too, Letter to Rogers, April 4, 1817), which is all I know of the history of that magical personage; and as to the germs of Manfred, they may be found in the Journal which I sent to Mrs. Leigh ... when I went over first the Dent, etc., ... shortly before I left Switzerland. I have the whole scene of Manfred before me."
Again, three years later he writes (à propos of Goethe's review of Manfred, which first appeared in print in his paper Kunst und Alterthum, June, 1820, and is republished in Goethe's Sämmtliche Werke ... Stuttgart, 1874, xiii. 640-642; see Letters, 1901, v. Appendix II. "Goethe and Byron," pp. 503-521): "His Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis (sic), in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the Staubach (sic) and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar" (Letter to Murray, June 7, 1820, Letters, 1901, v. 36). Medwin (Conversations, etc., pp. 210, 211), who of course had not seen the letters to Murray of 1817 or 1820, puts much the same story into Byron's mouth.
Now, with regard to the originality of Manfred, it may be taken for granted that Byron knew nothing about the "Faust-legend," or the "Faust-cycle." He solemnly denies that he had ever read Marlowe's Faustus, or the selections from the play in Lamb's Specimens, etc. (see Medwin's Conversations, etc., pp. 208, 209, and a hitherto unpublished Preface to Werner, vol. v.), and it is highly improbable that he knew anything of Calderon's El Mágico Prodigioso, which Shelley translated in 1822, or of "the beggarly elements" of the legend in Hroswitha's Lapsus et Conversio Theophrasti Vice-domini. But Byron's Manfred is "in the succession" of scholars who have reached the limits of natural and legitimate science, and who essay the supernatural in order to penetrate and comprehend the "hidden things of darkness." A predecessor, if not a progenitor, he must have had, and there can be no doubt whatever that the primary conception of the character, though by no means the inspiration of the poem, is to be traced to the "Monk's" oral rendering of Goethe's Faust, which he gave in return for his "bread and salt" at Diodati. Neither Jeffrey nor Wilson mentioned Faust, but the writer of the notice in the Critical Review (June, 1817, series v. vol. 5, pp. 622-629) avowed that "this scene (the first) is a gross plagiary from a great poet whom Lord Byron has imitated on former occasions without comprehending. Goethe's Faust begins in the same way;" and Goethe himself, in a letter to his friend Knebel, October, 1817, and again in his review in Kunst und Alterthum, June, 1820, emphasizes whilst he justifies and applauds the use which Byron had made of his work. "This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." Afterwards (see record of a conversation with Herman Fürst von Pückler, September 14, 1826, Letters, v. 511) Goethe somewhat modified his views, but even then it interested him to trace the unconscious transformation which Byron had made of his Mephistopheles. It is, perhaps, enough to say that the link between Manfred and Faust is formal, not spiritual. The problem which Goethe raised but did not solve, his counterfeit presentment of the eternal issue between soul and sense, between innocence and renunciation on the one side, and achievement and satisfaction on the other, was not the struggle which Byron experienced in himself or desired to depict in his mysterious hierarch of the powers of nature. "It was the Staubach and the Jungfrau, and something else," not the influence of Faust on a receptive listener, which called up a new theme, and struck out a fresh well-spring of the imagination. The motif of Manfred is remorse—eternal suffering for inexpiable crime. The sufferer is for ever buoyed up with the hope that there is relief somewhere in nature, beyond nature, above nature, and experience replies with an everlasting No! As the sunshine enhances sorrow, so Nature, by the force of contrast, reveals and enhances guilt. Manfred is no echo of another's questioning, no expression of a general world-weariness on the part of the time-spirit, but a personal outcry: "De profundis clamavi!"
No doubt, apart from this main purport and essence of his song, his sensitive spirit responded to other and fainter influences. There are "points of resemblance," as Jeffrey pointed out and Byron proudly admitted, between Manfred and the Prometheus of Æschylus. Plainly, here and there, "the tone and pitch of the composition," and "the victim in the more solemn parts," are Æschylean. Again, with regard to the supernatural, there was the stimulus of the conversation of the Shelleys and of Lewis, brimful of magic and ghost-lore; and lastly, there was the glamour of Christabel, "the wild and original" poem which had taken Byron captive, and was often in his thoughts and on his lips. It was no wonder that the fuel kindled and burst into a flame.
For the text of Goethe's review of Manfred, and Hoppner's translation of that review, and an account of Goethe's relation with Byron, drawn from Professor A. Brandl's Goethes Verhältniss zu Byron (Goethe-Jahrbuch, Zwanzigster Band, 1899), and other sources, see Letters, 1901, v. Appendix II. pp. 503-521.
For contemporary and other notices of Manfred, in addition to those already mentioned, see Eclectic Review, July, 1817, New Series, vol. viii. pp. 62-66; Gentleman's Magazine, July, 1817, vol. 87, pp. 45-47; Monthly Review, July, 1817, Enlarged Series, vol. 83, pp. 300-307; Dublin University Magazine, April, 1874, vol. 83, pp. 502-508, etc.
Manfred. Chamois Hunter. Abbot of St. Maurice. Manuel. Herman. Witch of the Alps. Arimanes. Nemesis. The Destinies. Spirits, etc.
The Scene of the Drama is amongst the Higher Alps—partly in the Castle of Manfred, and partly in the Mountains.
MANFRED. 106
ACT 1.
Scene 1.—Manfred alone.—Scene, a Gothic Gallery.107—Time, Midnight.
A star is seen at the darker end of the gallery: it is stationary; and a voice is heard singing.]
First Spirit.
Voice of the Second Spirit.
Voice of the Third Spirit.
Fourth Spirit.
Fifth Spirit.
Sixth Spirit.
Seventh Spirit.
The Seven Spirits.
(A voice is heard in the Incantation which follows.)117
Scene II.—The Mountain of the Jungfrau.—Time, Morning.—Manfred alone upon the cliffs.
Enter from below a Chamois Hunter.
As Manfred is in act to spring from the cliff, the Chamois Hunter seizes and retains him with a sudden grasp.
