himself; if he must come to other existences, it is that they may reply to him; and through this pretended epic he persisted in his eternal monologue.

But how all these powers, assembled in a single being, make him great! Into what mediocrity and platitude sinks the Faust of Goethe, compared to Manfred! As soon as we cease to see humanity in this Faust, what does he become? Is he a hero? A sad hero, who has no other task but to speak, is afraid, studies the shades of his sensations, and walks about! His worst action is to seduce a grisette, and to go and dance by night in bad company-two exploits which many a German student has accomplished. His wilfulness is whim, his ideas are longings and dreams. A poet's soul in a scholar's head, both unfit for action, and not harmonizing well together; discord within, and weakness without; in short, character is wanting: it is German all over. By his side, what a man is Manfred! He is a man; there is no fitter word, or one which could depict him better. He will not, at the sight of a spirit, "quake like a crawling, cowering, timorous worm." He will not regret that "he has neither land, nor pence, nor worldly honours, nor influence." He will not let himself be duped by the devil like a schoolboy, or go and amuse himself like a cockney with the phantasmagoria of the Brocken. He has lived like a feudal chief, not like a scholar who has taken his degree; he has fought, mastered others; he knows how to master himself. If he has studied magic arts, it is not from an alchemist's curiosity, but from a spirit of revolt:

"From my youth upwards

My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh.

My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe
The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,

Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing
Flit o'er the herbless granite, or to plunge

Into the torrent, and to roll along

On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave.
To follow through the night the moving moon,

The stars and their development; or catch

The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim;

Or to look, list'ning, on the scatter'd leaves,
While Autumn winds were at their evening song.
These were my pastimes, and to be alone;
For if the beings, of whom I was one-
Hating to be so-cross'd me in my path,
I felt myself degraded back to them,
And was all clay again. . . .o

I could not tame my nature down; for he

Must serve who fain would sway-and soothe-and sue-
And watch all time-and pry into all place-
And be a living lie-who would become
A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain'd to mingle with

A herd, though to be leader-and of wolves.

He lives alone, and he cannot live alone. The deep source of love, cut off from its natural issues, then overflows and lays waste the heart which refused to expand. He has loved, too well, one too near to him, his sister it may be; she has died of it, and impotent remorse fills the soul which no human occupation could satisfy:

. . . My solitude is solitude no more,

But peopled with the Furies;—I have gnash'd
My teeth in darkness till returning morn,
Then cursed myself till sunset;-I have pray'd
For madness as a blessing-'tis denied me.

I have affronted death-but in the war
Of elements the waters shrunk from me,

And fatal things pass'd harmless-the cold hand

Of an all-pitiless demon held me back,

Back by a single hair, which would not break.

In fantasy, imagination, all

The affluence of my soul. . . I plunged deep,

But, like an ebbing wave, it dashed me back

Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought.

I dwell in my despair,

And live, and live for ever." 8

He only wishes to see her once more: to this sole and all-powerful desire flow all the energies of his soul. He calls her up in the midst of spirits; she appears, but answers not. He prays to her-with what cries, what doleful cries of deep anguish! How he loves! With what yearning and effort all his downtrodden 7 Ibid.; Manfred," iii. 1, 56. 8 Ibid.; Manfred," ii. 2, 35.

Byron's Works, xi.; "Manfred," ii. 2, 32.

64

and outcrushed tenderness gushes out and escapes at the sight of those well-beloved eyes, which he sees for the last time! With what enthusiasm his convulsive arms are stretched towards that frail form which, shuddering, has quitted the tomb!-towards those cheeks in which the blood, forcibly recalled, plants "a strange hectic-like the unnatural red which Autumn plants upon the perished leaf."

Hear me, hear me―

Astarte! my beloved! speak to me:

I have so much endured-so much endure

Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more
Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me
Too much as I loved thee: we were not made
To torture thus each other, though it were
The deadliest sin to love as we have loved.
Say that thou loath'st me not-that I do bear
This punishment for both-that thou wilt be
One of the blessed-and that I shall die;
For hitherto all hateful things conspire
To bind me in existence-in a life
Which makes me shrink from immortality—
A future like the past. I cannot rest.

I know not what I ask, nor what I seek:

I feel but what thou art-and what I am;

And I would hear yet once before I perish
The voice which was my music-Speak to me!
For I have call'd on thee in the still night,
Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs,
And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves
Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name,

Which answer'd me-many things answer'd me-
Spirits and men-but thou wert silent all.
Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth,
And never found thy likeness-Speak to me!
Look on the fiends around-they feel for me:
I fear them not, and feel for thee alone-
Speak to me! though it be in wrath;-but say-
I reck not what-but let me hear thee once-

This once-once more!" 9

She speaks. What a sad and doubtful reply! Manfred's limbs are convulsed when she disappears. But an instant after the spirits see that:

Had he been one of us, he would have made
An awful spirit." 10

Will is the unshaken basis of this soul.

He did not bend before

the chief of the spirits; he stood firm and calm before the infernal throne, whilst all the demons were raging who would tear him to pieces: now he dies, and they assail him, but he still strives and conquers:

Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know:
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine:
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts-
Is its own origin of ill and end—

And its own place and time—its innate sense,
When stripp'd of this mortality, derives
No colour from the fleeting things without;

But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy,

Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;

I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey

But was my own destroyer, and will be

My own hereafter.-Back, ye baffled fiends!

The hand of death is on me-but not yours!" 11

This "I," the invincible I, who suffices to himself, on whom nothing has a hold, demons nor men, the sole author of his own good and ill, a sort of suffering or fallen god, but god always, even in its quivering flesh, amidst his soiled and blighted destiny -such is the hero and the work of this mind, and of the men of his race. If Goethe was the poet of the universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if in one the German genius found its interpreter, the English genius found its interpreter in the other.

Section V.-What Byron's Contemporaries Thought of Him. -His Morals

We can well imagine that Englishmen clamored at and repudiated the monster. Southey, the poet-laureate, said of him, in good biblical style, that he savored of Moloch and Belial-most of all of Satan; and, with the generosity of a brother poet, called the attention of government to him. We should fill many 10 Byron's Works, xi.; “Manfred,” ii. 4, 49. 11 Ibid. iii. 4, 70.

pages if we were to copy the reproaches of the respectable reviews against these "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and, hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul." This sounds like the emphasis of an episcopal charge and scholastic pedantry: in England the press does the duty of the police, and it never did it more violently than at that time. Opinion backed the press. Several times, in Italy, Lord Byron saw gentlemen leave a drawing-room with their wives, when he was announced. Owing to his title and celebrity, the scandal which he caused was more conspicuous than any other: he was a public sinner. One day an obscure parson sent him a prayer which he had found amongst the papers of his wife—a charming and pious lady, recently dead, and who had secretly prayed to God for the conversion of the great sinner. Conservative and Protestant England, after a quarter of a century of moral wars, and two centuries of moral education, carried its severity and rigor to extremes; and Puritan intolerance, like Catholic intolerance previously in Spain, put recusants out of the pale of the law. The proscription of voluptuous or abandoned life, the narrow observation of order and decency, the respect of all police, human and divine; the necessary bows at the mere name of Pitt, of the king, the church, the God of the Bible; the attitude of a gentleman in a white tie, conventional, inflexible, implacable-such were the customs then met with across the Channel, a hundred times more tyrannical than nowadays: at that time, as Stendhal says, a peer at his fireside dared not cross his legs, for fear of its being improper. England held herself stiff, uncomfortably laced in her stays of decorum. Hence arose two sources of misery: a man suffers, and is tempted to throw down the ugly choking apparatus, when he is sure that it can be done secretly. On the one side constraint, on the other hypocrisy-these are the two vices of English civilization; and it was these which Byron, with his poet's discernment and his combative instincts, attacked.

1 Southey, Preface to "A Vision of Judgment."