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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Manfred," Lord Byron presents a dramatic poem that intimately explores the tormented psyche of its titular character, a brooding aristocrat grappling with guilt, existential despair, and the supernatural. Written in 1817, the work is steeped in Romantic ideals, employing a rich, lyrical style characterized by vivid imagery and philosophical musings. Byron deftly intertwines elements of Gothic literature, reflecting the era's fascination with the sublime and the darker aspects of human experience. The interplay of nature and the supernatural serves not only as a backdrop but as a catalyst for Manfred's internal struggle, evoking themes of isolation, redemption, and the quest for knowledge beyond mortal confines. Lord Byron, a central figure in the Romantic movement, often wrestled with themes of identity, loss, and societal expectations. His personal life, marked by scandal and melancholy, influenced his creative output, allowing him to delve into the human condition with emotional authenticity. Byron's discontent with social conventions and his affinity for the tragic hero archetype manifest deeply within Manfred, encapsulating the internal conflicts he encountered in his own life. "Manfred" is a profound exploration of the complexities of the human spirit, making it an essential read for anyone interested in Romantic literature and existential philosophy. Byron's masterful and emotive portrayal of a man's struggle against fate resonates with readers and invites them into a world where passion and despair collide. It is a must-read for those who appreciate deep philosophical inquiry wrapped in poetic form. 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: 2023
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Manfred
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Manfred by Lord Byron and The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt to stage a dialogue between imaginative creation and lived experience. Placing a literary work beside a life narrative clarifies how authorial presence and public memory shape each other. The through-line is the formation of a distinctive persona, poised between defiance and introspection, framed by questions of agency, remorse, and transcendence. The curatorial aim is to invite readers to consider how a single name anchors both an artistic vision and a biographical account, each refracting the other without collapsing their differences.
Bringing Manfred into proximity with The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt emphasizes a shared concern with identity constructed through narrative. One proceeds by imaginative concentration, the other by recounting a life, yet both accumulate meanings around the figure of Lord Byron. The aim is to foreground a motif of self-fashioning and responsibility that resonates across creative and biographical registers. Encountered together rather than separately, these works encourage cross-reading: the life invites questions about the work’s aspirations, while the work complicates assumptions about the life, producing a layered view that neither text alone can fully sustain.
The guiding principle is to trace an arc from inner conflict to outward portrayal. Manfred presents an intense meditation on will, guilt, and the limits of human striving; John Galt’s account provides a complementary portrait of character, circumstance, and reputation. Together they crystallize a philosophical inquiry into freedom and accountability, the tension between individuality and society, and the costs of unyielding purpose. By aligning an imaginative composition with a biographical study, the collection seeks to illuminate how ideas migrate between art and life, shaping ethical horizons while preserving the distinct textures of each mode.
Unlike encountering these titles in isolation, the present pairing positions readers to hold two complementary lenses at once: the expressive power of Manfred and the measured narration of The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt. The result is not a search for sources or keys, but a sustained attention to correspondences and divergences. The aim is to temper oversimplified portraits with complexity, neither collapsing the work into biography nor isolating the life from artistic consequence. This curated juxtaposition highlights continuities of tone and value while preserving necessary distance between imaginative and documentary claims.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Set side by side, the texts speak across a threshold between invention and recollection. Manfred articulates an inward drama of motive and resolve, while The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt observes the formation of a public figure. Recurring motifs echo between them: solitude and society, daring and restraint, remorse and endurance. The work’s charged voice foregrounds questions that the life narrative rephrases as matters of temperament and circumstance. In return, the biographical vantage underscores how acts and reputations refract ideals, enabling a conversation about the costs and consolations of self-definition.
The contrast in approach creates a fertile dialogue. Manfred advances with compressed intensity, its rhetoric shaped by interior urgency and the search for meaning. John Galt’s portrayal moves with steadier cadence, attentive to sequence, relationship, and the contingencies that outline a life. The divergence in tone and method—lyrical concentration versus biographical overview—generates productive friction. One privileges the drama of conscience; the other privileges the record of conduct. Each illuminates blind spots in the other, revealing how emotion, memory, and narrative framing alternately amplify or temper the figure who stands at the center of both texts.
Because John Galt addresses the same figure who authored Manfred, lines of influence within this collection run in both directions. Galt’s shaping of character, motive, and public image inevitably shades interpretations of Byron’s creative output, including Manfred. Conversely, Manfred’s preoccupations attune readers to notice particular inflections in the life narrative, such as moments that foreground isolation, resolve, or principled refusal. The exchange is less about tracing sources than about noticing resonances: the ways a life-writer’s emphases and an artist’s imagined conflicts meet, diverge, and return, offering a subtle interplay between portrait and projection without requiring one to explain the other.
Across both works, moral dilemmas recur in complementary forms. Manfred poses challenges about the reach of will, the ethics of refusal, and the burden of memory; The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt refracts comparable questions through actions, relationships, and reputation. The juxtaposition emphasizes how ideals encounter limits set by time, community, and consequence. It also presses on the difference between confessing a difficulty in art and negotiating it in life. By holding these tensions together, the collection sustains a conversation about judgment, compassion, and the possibility of principled independence amid persistent scrutiny.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
The pairing remains vital because it foregrounds a durable question: how to approach a powerful work when its maker’s life is simultaneously illuminated and contested. Manfred concentrates existential and ethical inquiry, while The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt renders a sustained portrait of the person behind the name. Together they model a reflective practice for reading across art and biography without subordinating one to the other. In a culture attentive to image, accountability, and agency, this conversation offers tools for nuanced judgment, affirming complexity while resisting the flattening pressures of admiration or condemnation.
Manfred has long attracted sustained attention as a concentrated expression of Lord Byron’s imaginative reach, inviting debates about voice, responsibility, and transcendence. The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt has likewise served as a formative account that shaped early perceptions of the author’s character and career. Although approaches have varied over time, the general trajectory underscores the continuing relevance of reading a major work in concert with an influential life narrative. The result is a durable field of inquiry concerned with how artistic intensity and biographical testimony sharpen, complicate, and sometimes correct each other.
Beyond scholarship, these works continue to circulate within broader culture. The figure expressed in Manfred and the portrait assembled in The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt have inspired retellings, creative homages, and ongoing debate about the relationship between talent and conduct. Their language and scenarios have been echoed, revised, and contested across media, while classrooms and public forums regularly revisit their questions. This afterlife testifies to a lasting fascination with the interplay of charisma, conscience, and consequence, reinforcing the value of keeping the literary creation and the life account in sustained conversation.
Taken together, Manfred and The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt demonstrate how a single author can generate multiple, sometimes competing, lenses for understanding ambition, vulnerability, and moral choice. The pairing nurtures an interpretive practice grounded in attentiveness rather than certainty, opening space for reconsideration as new questions arise. It affirms that art and life neither mirror nor cancel each other; they intersect in shifting, illuminating ways. By presenting these titles side by side, the collection honors both the autonomy of a work and the insight of a life study, inviting measured admiration and thoughtful critique.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Manfred and The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt emerge from a Europe remade by the Napoleonic Wars and the settlements of 1815. Restoration monarchies reimposed hierarchies while liberal and nationalist arguments refused to disappear. Britain combined parliamentary continuity with expanding executive surveillance, especially toward the press and public gatherings. An aristocratic title could open doors yet also provoke scrutiny, as celebrity culture sharpened political stakes. Public debates over liberty, legitimacy, and the moral authority of church and crown shaped receptions. Censorship remained uneven but real, aligning with patronage networks that mediated what could appear in print and on stage.
Manfred’s first readers lived amid the anxieties of demobilization, debt, and food crises that followed wartime taxation. Industrial innovations accelerated class tensions, as artisans and laborers confronted enclosure, mechanization, and criminalized protest. In Britain, sedition laws and prosecutions targeted radical journalism; the theatre faced licensing rules policed by officials. The dramatic-poem form enabled circulation without submitting to stage authorities, while still invoking performative energy. Elite readers encountered the work through fashionable salons and circulating libraries; less privileged audiences encountered extracts, reviews, and rumor. Against this backdrop, Galt’s later biography navigated libel risks and expectations of decorum, particularly regarding private correspondence.
Continental unrest persisted despite diplomatic choreography. Towns and valleys across the Alps witnessed tightened policing, passport controls, and garrisons, as rulers feared conspiracies and clandestine print. Nationalist societies germinated in Italy and the Balkans; imperial frontiers from the Mediterranean to India shaped British policy debates. Travelers’ narratives and the Grand Tour, though changing, still supplied elite readers with landscapes and cultural comparisons. The mountain setting of Manfred resonated with this cross-border awareness, inviting audiences to read natural scenery through political lenses. Galt’s biographical vantage point situates cosmopolitan mobility within these structures, noting how movement, status, and surveillance intersected in postwar Europe.
Class, gender, and racial hierarchies organized everyday life and the literary marketplace. Aristocratic privilege coexisted with precarious credit, as fortunes rose and fell with speculation. Respectability politics regulated women’s visibility and speech, sharpening public curiosity about private conduct while punishing transgression. Britain’s expanding empire relied on racialized labor systems abroad and anxieties about cultural mixture at home. Such frameworks conditioned how rebellious individualism, solitude, and spiritual defiance were interpreted. They also shaped the narrative choices available to a biographer like Galt, who balanced candor with propriety amid expectations that public figures model virtue even when their art suggested troubling freedoms.
Publication depended on complex systems of risk management. Printers worried about prosecutions and pirated editions; booksellers relied on subscriptions, publicity, and timely reprints. Review periodicals could exalt or ruin reputations and sometimes acted as informal censors. Private patrons and aristocratic acquaintances offered protection but demanded deference. The stage, tightly regulated, encouraged poet-playwrights to seek readers rather than licensing officers. Manfred exemplifies this calculus, addressing theatre without submitting to its bureaucracy. Galt’s biography inhabits the same market of curiosity and apprehension, presenting character and career in a format palatable to circulating libraries while resisting intrusive scandal that might invite injunctions.
By the time Galt wrote, calls for parliamentary reform animated Britain, culminating in the 1832 settlement. Urban associations, petitioning campaigns, and pamphleteering pushed issues of representation and corruption to the forefront. Biography became a political instrument, illustrating public virtue or vice and supplying examples to a widening electorate. At the same time, religious controversies over doctrinal authority and personal conscience sustained interest in confessional tones. The social meanings attached to aristocracy, exile, and artistic independence were therefore in flux. Galt’s narrative position reflects these tensions, mediating between memorialization and critique in a culture recalibrating hierarchy, publicity, and responsibility.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Romantic-era inquiry contested Enlightenment confidence while inheriting its critical tools. Skeptical of mechanical explanations for mind and morality, writers explored subjectivity, memory, and the sublime. Manfred channels that tension by yoking rhetorical self-scrutiny to visionary spectacle, presenting inward conflict alongside audacious address to nature and metaphysical authority. The poem’s stance toward reason and feeling is neither naïve nor merely celebratory; it dramatizes ambivalence about knowledge, guilt, and power. Galt’s biography, in turn, interprets character formation within this climate, weighing temperament, education, and circumstance while resisting hagiography. Both works thereby participate in a broader debate over interiority’s public significance.
Scientific and technological change widened imaginative horizons. Steam transport redrew distances, while chemistry and electricity offered new metaphors for force, contagion, and illumination. Early geology unsettled biblical chronologies and reoriented attention to strata, eruption, and deep time. Against this backdrop, Manfred’s high-altitude scenes resonate with emerging discourses of risk, experiment, and observation, even as the poem declines reduction to any one science. The mountain became less a decorative backdrop than a laboratory of feeling. Galt’s life-writing attends to a similar interplay of environment and temperament, tracking how travel, climate, and setting seemed to imprint themselves upon sensibility and style.
The period’s arts conversed across media. Landscape painting pursued atmospheric effects, and concert culture elevated instrumental mood as a vehicle for unspeakable states. Theatres professionalized staging technologies that simulated storms, ruins, and spectacular vistas, even as licensing constrained textual daring. Manfred’s hybrid identity—poem with dramatic architecture—absorbs these currents, borrowing theatre’s dynamism without conceding authority to managers or censors. Reading became a performative act; declamation in drawing rooms functioned as informal stage. Galt’s biography likewise borrows techniques from portraiture and moral anecdote, composing a character study that invites spectatorship while insisting on documentary scaffolding, a tension central to Romantic aesthetics.
Debates about poetic diction, sincerity, and the moral office of art animated rival formations within British letters. Some prized chastened decorum and religious edification; others explored transgressive desire, solitude, and defiance of customary duty. Manfred’s rhetoric participates in this contest, staging self-authorization and refusal of conventional consolations while courting pathos. Galt’s The Life of Lord Byron refracts the same controversy through biographical technique, adjudicating how much interpretation a narrator may impose when rendering a turbulent career. The result is not a manifesto but a record of practice, showing how Romantic-era works argued about ethics by dramatizing competing styles of speech.
The concept of genius crystallized amid expanding print capitalism. Readers sought exemplary lives to anchor an increasingly unstable public sphere, while critics questioned whether strong feeling excused irregular conduct. Manfred probes the costs of extraordinary will and knowledge; Galt’s biography considers how reputation is assembled from letters, anecdotes, and recollection. Both expose the scaffolding of fame as a process, not a gift. In doing so, they register institutional shifts: universities revalued modern languages, periodicals professionalized judgment, and salons curated taste. The works neither celebrate nor reject these authorities outright, but test the claims by which culture legitimates singular voices.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Subsequent upheavals—revolutions, reform acts, and accelerating empire—reshaped the reception of both works. Manfred’s challenge to authority could read as heroic protest in one decade and as dangerous license in another. Galt’s biography, appearing as political representation widened, doubled as a primer in public character: how to judge, how to remember. After 1830, the iconic figure at the center of both texts became a shorthand for modern celebrity and scandal, a symbol mobilized by admirers and detractors alike. These shifts demonstrate how political atmospheres recalibrate the ethics of admiration, penitence, and sovereignty that the poem and biography examine.
Victorian moralism alternately domesticated and demonized the works’ energies. Editions were trimmed or annotated to steer interpretation toward edification, and biographical narration leaned on exemplary uplift. Yet fascination with audacity never faded; the market rewarded images of intensity even as gatekeepers preached restraint. Manfred moved between intimate reading circles and public controversy over its provocations. The Life of Lord Byron, reliant on testimony and recollection, became a touchstone for debates about biographical tact and the rights of survivors. These patterns reveal a nineteenth century torn between idealizing virtue and consuming the spectacle of troubled individuality it purported to condemn.
Across the twentieth century, new interpretive frameworks reframed meaning. After global wars, readers emphasized themes of estrangement, guilt, and endurance, aligning the poem’s defiance with existential inquiry. Biographers and critics approached Galt’s methods with fresh skepticism, testing anecdote against archival corroboration and reconsidering how narrative voice molds remembrance. Expanding university English programs canonized both texts while also dissecting them as artifacts of performance and publicity. Translation and international circulation diversified receptions beyond Britain, as censors alternately restricted and deployed the figure central to both books. Thus, modernity turned these works into laboratories for studying cultural authority itself.
Adaptation broadened after 1900. Manfred inspired stage realizations, visual tableaux, and musical responses that accentuated mood over narrative, allowing artists to project contemporary anxieties onto its architecture. Biographical cinema and broadcasting borrowed Galt’s scaffolding of episodes and witnesses, reframing his approach for mass audiences while inheriting his dilemmas about privacy. Preservation milestones, including scholarly editions and expiring copyrights, encouraged fuller documentation and public-domain dissemination. The works’ portability across media made them durable vehicles for negotiating charisma, confession, and rebellion. Each adaptation effectively restages the original argument about authority—who commands, who answers, and how the self is performed.
Late twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism opened new vistas. Post-colonial approaches probed how imperial circuits enabled celebrity and how exoticized settings mediated power, without requiring a reductive allegory. Gender studies scrutinized the staging of masculinity, vulnerability, and self-fashioning; life writing theory interrogated Galt’s narrative voice, its management of testimony, and its implicit pedagogies. Environmental humanities, attentive to mountains and weather, reframed Manfred’s landscapes as sites of ecological risk and resilience. Digital scholarship mapped publication networks, reception timelines, and variant texts, making both works test cases for public humanities. These conversations complicate inherited judgments while renewing interpretive possibilities.
Today, access is broader and the stakes different. Classroom anthologies, open-access archives, and digitized correspondence situate the poem and Galt’s biography within transnational debates about celebrity, privacy, and dissent. Performers and readers alike experiment with spoken-word renditions and site-specific readings, restoring theatrical energies originally channeled onto the page. Editorial projects emphasize transparency about textual variants and historical contexts, encouraging responsible freedom rather than prescriptive piety. Far from period curiosities, these works function as instruments for thinking about power: how individuals challenge systems, how communities memorialize conflict, and how cultural memory negotiates the costs of charisma.
Synopsis (Selection)
Manfred
Byron’s dramatic poem follows a guilt-ridden nobleman in the Alps who summons spirits to erase his memories and defies earthly and supernatural authority, blending Gothic atmosphere with a meditation on remorse and will.
The Life of Lord Byron by John Galt
A contemporary biography that traces Byron’s lineage, education, travels, literary career, personal controversies, and political engagement, drawing on correspondence and anecdotes to depict his character and public reception.
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.
As they descend the rocks with difficulty, the scene closes.
