SOURCE: Eggenschwiler, David. “The Tragic and Comic Rhythms of Manfred.” Studies in Romanticism 13, no. 1 (winter 1974): 63-77.

[In the following essay, Eggenschwiler discusses the aesthetic unity of Manfred while taking into account its logical inconsistencies.]

Manfred is now generally recognized as an important transitional work in Byron's career: together with Childe Harold iii and iv, it has a sophistication of theme and character that Byron had not achieved before 1816. Yet the same critical commentary that has pointed out a richness of religious sources, dramatic traditions, and philosophical problems has also left the play seeming quite muddled. After acknowledging Byron's broad interests and rhetorical force, the reader may well consider the play a bag of ill-sorted delights. Even M. K. Joseph, who defends Byron “as a poet,” concludes that Manfred is a confused mixture of genres.¹ And, in terms of logical consistency, the objection is valid. Consider, for example, the moral ambiguities in the character of Manfred. Peter Thorslev has shown him to be a composite of the hero-villain of gothic melodrama and the Promethean rebel against tyranny; thus Manfred is variously the agent and opponent of evil.² Or consider the apparently confused metaphysics of the play. Whereas some commentators have found the universe of the play fated and deterministic, others have found it existentially disordered, and there is enough evidence to support both mutually exclusive views.³ Perhaps with enough ingenuity these contradictions could be logically resolved, but that would require intellectual manipulations that would not show the work to be a convincing dramatic whole.

Yet, despite these logical contradictions, Manfred does produce a strongly unified effect. Unfortunately, early attempts to account for it too often diverted analysis from the work itself. There is not much help in being referred to Byron's overwhelming and complex personality (which may explain a cause, but not the nature and effect, of the play) or in being told that Byron's works are sustained by a rapid movement and cannot stand much looking into. Lately, both of these critical attitudes have passed out of fashion, and recent accounts of the play's unity have centered on such internal matters as image patterns and implicit general themes.⁴ But even these useful studies isolate single elements, and while they show some coherent strains, they still do not solve the problem of overall coherence. So, in this study I shall offer an approach that demonstrates the aesthetic unity of the play without ignoring major elements of theme, character, style, and structure and without denying the logical inconsistencies that would injure the play as a work of ethics or metaphysics. This approach should, at certain points, parallel other studies of Manfred, but it should also discover matters that have been overlooked or misconstrued.

Since the feeling of unity produced by Manfred is mainly an aesthetic effect, it seems sensible to treat the problem in aesthetic, rather than philosophical or psychological, terms. And, surprisingly enough, this lyrical, gothic play seems best considered through two of the most traditional categories of dramatic criticism, the tragic and comic. In her study of artistic symbolism, Feeling and Form, Susanne K. Langer makes these controversial terms flexible enough by limiting them to essential characteristics. She claims that the essence of the “tragic rhythm” is its inevitability: its created form is Fate, “the virtual future as an accomplished whole.”⁵ This fatal rhythm, which ends in suffering, may use any number of religious or philosophical beliefs—the will of the gods, universal moral orders, inherited curses, psychological determinism—but the action must be necessary and catastrophic. One need not accept the whole framework of Professor Langer's aesthetics to find this definition useful; and, while some will consider it too inclusive, her definition isolates characteristics common to most modern definitions of tragedy, however diverse they may be otherwise. For example, through his studies of myth Northrop Frye similarly concludes that tragedy is “the epiphany of law, of that which is and must be.” Dorothea Krook, from a moralized Aristotelean point of view positing a transcendental order, insists that tragedy demonstrates the “necessity of suffering.” And Oscar Mandel, writing in what he calls the nonmetaphysical tradition, claims that the timelessness of tragedy “is predicated on the idea and technique of logical inevitability.”⁶ Admittedly, this much agreement does not settle the controversy over tragic form, but it does suggest that Professor Langer's definition is important and flexible enough for the purposes of this study.

In the “comic rhythm,” she claims, Fate is replaced by Fortune, and the unknowable future is filled with chance and coincidence. The sense of life is “always new, infinitely complex, and therefore infinitely variable in its possible expressions.”⁷ Similarly, Northrop Frye claims that comedy, unlike tragedy, cannot be inevitable, that the conventional happy ending is brought about by the author's obvious manipulation of the plot.⁸ Thus, the two forms are diametrically opposed in terms of their movements. Tragedy requires causation, necessity, and therefore a tightly concentrated and coherent action; comedy seems arbitrary and episodic, giving the impression of variegated and incoherent life.

These opposing definitions provide at least a heuristic device for studying Manfred, since Byron plays several varieties of tragic rhythm against several varieties of the comic. In the main, he presents a character who enacts and finally accepts a tragic necessity within a comically arbitrary universe. The opening scene establishes these opposing forms at the outset. Appearing in his midnight gallery, Manfred claims that his soul is under a curse that makes him have no fears, hopes, or wishes; an “all-nameless hour” in the past has determined his present and future, making his life inescapably sorrowful. Although he makes vague references to a sense of guilt and a condemned star, he tells little of the cause or nature of the curse; he merely asserts a tragic necessity in general and abstract terms.

Next, using a power associated with his curse, Manfred calls up the seven spirits of the universe, each of which controls an element of the natural world; and these spirits introduce a comic rhythm directly opposed to the opening monologue. Readers seeking a philosophical consistency in the play commonly assume that these spirits are the same ones that appear in Act ii with Nemesis, the Destinies, and Arimanes, the evil master of the universe. Through such identification these spirits are thus seen as the malignant and fatal powers of nature that Manfred later defies.⁹ But that reading substitutes a philosophical order for the dramatic structure of the play, and it ignores the impressions that the spirits of Act i give of themselves and their functions. They do not reinforce Manfred's vision of fate and tragic necessity; instead, they present a natural world that is multitudinous, changing, and arbitrary. Three of the seven spirits do not imply harmful actions at all. Of the remaining four, two stress the power of the avalanches, glacial movements, and earthquakes that they control, but they do not refer directly to destructiveness. The other two are both hostile to man, but in quite different ways. The Seventh Spirit claims to be a purposefully ruling power, influencing Manfred's “destiny” through a condemned star, but the Fifth Spirit seems much more randomly destructive, perhaps even personifying the unpredictable weather that alternatively brings sailors helpful winds and disastrous storms. Obviously, this chorus of spirits shows that nature seems at times hostile to man, but it does not show it to be always so. Sometimes nature appears purposefully destructive, but at other times it seems arbitrary, indifferent, obeisant, or even flattering toward man. The fatalistic view of the Seventh Spirit, the spirit of Manfred's star, is identical to the tragic view Manfred implied earlier, but in the context of the entire chorus this view is one of several inadequate impressions that the whole of nature gives of itself. The world of all seven spirits is too variable to justify any one interpretation, especially one as narrowly deterministic and ordered as Manfred's.

Byron further shows how variable nature is by presenting the chorus through a variety of poetic styles that contrast sharply with Manfred's ruminative, gloomy, blank-verse monologue. By varying the tone, imagery, and rhythm of the lyrics and by arranging the lyrics to contrast with each other, Byron shows a world that is delicately beautiful yet powerful, graceful yet brutal, subservient yet rebellious. The First Spirit, speaking in trochaic tetrameter couplets, sounds like a Shakespearean sprite, with closest kinship to Ariel. Descending on a star-beam from its azure and vermilion mansion in the clouds, this spirit salutes Manfred in a courtly style: “To thine adjuration bowed: / Mortal—be thy wish avowed!”¹⁰ The Second Spirit, through irregular ballad quatrains, boasts of its mountain-power. Whereas the first lyric evoked the delicate hues of summer twilight, the second tells of the austere majesty of Mont Blanc with its rock, snow, and restless glacial mass. Whereas the First Spirit paid formal homage to Manfred even while recognizing his mortal nature, the Second arrogantly scorns him: “And what with me would'st Thou?” The Third Spirit, chanting in anapestic dimeter quatrains, re-establishes an obedient attitude (“To the Spirit of Ocean / Thy wishes unfold!”) and a delicate, exotic imagery. The mood of this lyric, however, differs from that of both preceding lyrics. Neither courtly nor austere, it describes a hushed undersea world that will become a familiar dream in Victorian poetry (cf., especially, Tennyson's early mermaid poems and Arnold's “The Forsaken Merman”). The Fourth Spirit continues the verse form and the obedience of the Third, but its imagery reverts to the power of the Second. As the Spirit of Earth, whose province reaches from the roots to the summits of the Andes, this spirit unites the force of earthquakes with an acceptance of Manfred's will. But this union is immediately qualified by the Fifth Spirit. In its two ballad quatrains, it briefly acknowledges Manfred's control but is mainly concerned with its hurricane, which will sink the unsuspecting fleet at sea. Although it has hurried to Manfred's bidding, it remains cynical and almost jaunty. Not so the Sixth Spirit, whose simple couplet is a resentful cry of pain: “My dwelling is the shadow of the Night, / Why doth thy magic torture me with light?” Finally, the Seventh Spirit, in largely regular tetrameter couplets, counters this cry with its own assertion of mastery. While admitting that it is forced to descend to Manfred, it claims ultimate control over his destiny.

Although this sketch of the seven lyrics may seem too analytic for their immediate effect, it is intended as a critical corrective. Most studies of the play have understandably concentrated on the protagonist and either slighted his dramatic context or seen it almost entirely as a reflection of his mind. But the choral passages of Act 1 are important to the movement of the whole play. Far from having the “Southeyan jingle” that has been attributed to them,¹¹ they are stylistically precise and thematically pointed. And far from showing a fatalistic natural order, they establish a variable comic world that opposes Manfred's vision of tragic necessity.

Having summoned the Spirits, Manfred asks that they grant him “self-oblivion.” Through these personifications of the natural world he would escape from a consciousness that torments him with guilt, linking the present to the past in tragic responsibility. He would die if death would bring him oblivion, if it would break the pattern of necessary suffering through which he finds himself moving. Appropriately, he turns to the spirits of nature for this release; even if they have not shown a Wordsworthian beneficence, they do represent a phenomenal world at odds with the tragic pattern. But they cannot give the release he desires, for Manfred cannot renounce his mind, the “Promethean spark” that makes him both a hero and a sufferer; because of his essence and his will, he cannot be reduced to the purposeless clay in which he is imprisoned.

As his futile exchange with the spirits ends, Manfred asks the most powerful of them to appear in a suitable form, and the Spirit of his Star appears to him as a woman, suggesting Astarte, who died because of Manfred's love for her. Since she is associated with Manfred's fate, the tragic rhythm is again firmly established. Manfred falls senseless from grief, and an incantatory voice concludes the scene by stating the main patterns of the play. In the first three stanzas the voice describes the comic world of nature and Manfred's isolation from it. Although there is much similarity to the “Zelucco theme,” the guilty man's inability to appreciate nature's beauty and goodness, the voice does not describe nature as entirely good. Rather, it reinforces the variegated world of the seven spirits:

When the Moon is on the wave,
          And the glow-worm in the grass,
And the meteor on the grave,
          And the wisp on the morass;
When the falling stars are shooting,
And the answered owls are hooting,
And the silent leaves are still
In the shadow of the hill,
Shall my soul be upon thine,
With a power and a sign.

Although this night-time world will have the calm beauty of moonlit waves and glow-worms, it will also have the ominous meteor on the grave and the gothic wisp on the morass. Its “answered” owls suggest a companionship among natural creatures, but the shooting stars and the “shadow of the hill” question this harmony. This setting that frames Manfred's suffering is not a conventionally idyllic scene like that which Byron uses to begin The Bride of Abydos (“And all, save the spirit of man, is divine”); it is the ambiguous and unpredictable world from which the tragic hero will be isolated by the curse on him.

In the last four stanzas of the Incantation, the voice explains Manfred's state, and we are given a pointed example of how complex and logically confused the tragic rhythm is in this play. Manfred is told that a magic voice has baptized him with a curse and that the air, wind, night, and sun are so transformed that they will cause him suffering instead of rest. Apparently an external power is punishing him with a spell. But next Manfred is told that the spell is derived from his own qualities; he is tormented by his own poison. Thus, the curse of inevitable suffering seems to come both from Manfred's self and from a power outside his self. This paradox might be resolved by seeing the voice as a projection of Manfred's guilty consciousness: having committed mysterious crimes, Manfred is so tortured by guilt and self-loathing that he seems to be under a spell and an external power seems to have transformed the natural world for him. But even this explanation (which arbitrarily places characters inside or outside Manfred's mind as is convenient) does not solve the problem of tragic responsibility. If Manfred, who we are told is of the brotherhood of Cain, is responsible for his suffering, if he has cursed himself through his own nature, what are we to make of the earlier claims that his destiny is ruled by a star that, itself, is subject to a more powerful fate? Attempts to sort out a logical sequence of causality lead us into circular arguments in which external fate and personal responsibility alternate in their claims. Sometimes (as the Seventh Spirit claims) the curse seems to determine the character; sometimes (as the incantatory voice claims) the nature of the character seems to determine the curse. Sometimes Manfred seems fated because he is unique, apart from ordinary men; sometimes he seems unique because he is singled out by a predestining fate. And these matters are not to be decided by arguing whether Byron believed in free will or determinism; his contradictory statements throughout the oriental tales and the later tragedies show how futile that approach is. Through Manfred, Byron is presenting the power and mystery of tragic destiny, which is not entirely a matter of moral responsibility and character or of external fate. The dramatic effect is not of a metaphysical position consistently worked out, but of a tragic rhythm in which the destinies of character and fate are both felt. And the tragic rhythm need not be metaphysically consistent; it need only give a sense of order and necessary causation, the antithesis of the comic rhythm.

If my account of these two rhythms of the play is valid, the first scene has a circular development. It begins with Manfred's assertion of his tragic destiny. It answers this assertion with a chorus of spirits that exemplify a comic, open, natural world which implies various and conflicting accounts of its essence. From this chorus Manfred asks release from his tragic destiny; he would dissipate into the oblivion of matter. Unable to find this release, he is reminded of his fatal past; and the scene closes where it began, in an exposition of a tragic destiny that involves Manfred's responsibility and a fatality beyond his control.

The second scene of the play largely recapitulates the opposing rhythms of the first, making them more explicit. Instead of calling up spirits of the elements, Manfred considers nature directly and finds himself opposed to its changing forms: the eagle that soars and swoops or the pastoral “natural music” that is born and dies in a moment. These natural forms produce a harmony out of various elements, but Manfred cannot accept himself as “half dust, half deity.” He does momentarily liken himself to the blasted pines of the mountainside, but he immediately reasserts their differences: the pines, blasted by a singularly harsh winter, are the results of the natural and unpredictable seasons; but Manfred was “ploughed by moments,” and his ruined state was caused by his fatal past experiences. Elaborating this distinction between comic and tragic suffering, Manfred calls on the avalanche to crush him, but it falls on the “harmless villager” beneath. These natural forces that destroy pines or villagers are not retributive; they show no justice, purpose, or necessity, for they are the arbitrary forces of the comic world.

As in the first scene of the play, Manfred also considers death as an escape from his suffering, and he almost commits suicide as a possible break in the pattern of fate and retribution. Here, suicide would not culminate the tragic rhythm as it does in Sardanapalus, where it is an appropriate end to the hero's dilemma and failure. Instead, it would be an arbitrary act, uncharacteristic of Manfred and at odds with the coherent plot of his drama. As we are told several times, it is Manfred's “fatality to live” and suffer, at least until the time appointed for his death.¹² When that time comes, we are given no reason why it arrives at that moment. At the end of Act ii, the Phantom of Astarte suddenly announces, “Manfred! To-morrow ends thine earthly ills,” and throughout Act iii Manfred knows that he will die soon. But we do not know why his “earthly ills” are ended when they are; we do not know for sure whether he has completed his term of suffering or has progressed to unearthly ills; in fact, we do not even know how he does die, since he overcomes the spirits that would drag him to Hell. He seems literally to be his “own destroyer” (a phrase that he uses in an ethical sense), but, paradoxically, his death seems to have been ordained by an external fate.

As confusing or vague as these issues of Manfred's death are in logical terms, they are consistent in terms of the tragic and comic rhythms. Manfred's tragic death gives a strong sense of inevitability, and like other tragic elements in the play it seems to come both from his moral responsibility and self-punishment and from an imposed destiny. Since there are no mortal or supernatural avengers and since the hero does not kill himself in punishment, we feel the general but powerful mystery of tragedy, the sense of an inevitability that cannot be exhausted by any simple cause. And this tragic death is opposed to the suicide that Manfred contemplates in Act i. That suicide would deny inevitability; it would be a totally free gesture, arbitrarily ending the term of suffering and affirming the comic randomness of existence.¹³ It would deny the power of fate, and it would oppose Manfred's own sense of guilt and necessary punishment. The desire for suicide is a sign of weakness in this tragic hero as tragic hero, a longing to be rid of the burden that is the essence of his being. Thus, when he comes closest to suicide, he is “giddy,” “most sick at heart,” and “all feebleness” (i.ii.89-115); his essential self is momentarily overcome by suffering. After being saved by the Chamois Hunter, Manfred is again strong and independent. Although he later briefly asks the Witch of the Alps for death, he does not again attempt suicide. Overcoming one temptation to escape, by the end of Act i he has taken a further step in completely accepting his tragic fate.

Like the first scene of the play, Act ii is circular, moving from the tragic to the comic and back to the tragic again. But there is a shift in emphasis as the tragic becomes increasingly dominant. In Act ii, Scene i, Manfred is haunted by the shed blood of Astarte, and he offers the Chamois Hunter a confusing explanation of his past. On the one hand, he claims that his own actions have made his days and night an unchanging desert. On the other, he claims that his “injuries,” rather than his actions, destroyed those who loved him and that he never killed an enemy, save in just defense. Thus, he represents himself as both an aggressor and a victim. One could partially reconcile these poses by assuming that Manfred's past was similar to Byron's Giaour, who helped to destroy his lover by involving her in a forbidden, but not malicious, love affair; the Giaour's acts, although not evil, helped to cause evil. Yet even this explanation does not resolve all of the conflicting impressions Manfred creates. We are told that he has been as extreme in evil as in good (ii.ii.35-36), and he admits that he has ceased to justify his deeds to himself—“the last infirmity of evil” (i.ii.27-29). He surely has traces of the gothic villain-hero. But he also suggests at times that he was more sinned against than sinning, a victim of circumstances that he could not control and did not intend. Perhaps when he states that he would not change his lot with the Chamois Hunter since he can bear what other men “could not brook to dream,” there may be even a hint of the tragic scapegoat, the ritualistic hero who suffers as a representative of weaker men.¹⁴ Again, Byron has combined conflicting varieties of the tragic hero.

In the next scene, the comic rhythm reappears as Manfred looks upon a mountain torrent, which has “the many hues of heaven” but also resembles the tail of Death's horse in the Apocalypse. He calls upon the beautiful Witch of the Alps in order to gaze on her for a moment, but—even though he half-heartedly asks her to revive the dead or kill him—he no longer thinks that spirits can help. In fact, the Witch says and does very little. Manfred relates to her his own history, which shows how much he is coming to accept his tragic fate. By the end of the scene, the Witch has changed somewhat as she helps to provide a transition into the next movement of the play. At first she is associated with the beautiful daughters of Earth, with a sleeping infant, and with summer's twilight; but finally she becomes aggressive, asking Manfred to obey her and do her bidding. Thus she enables him to reject her severely, and she serves as a prelude to the next two tragic scenes with malignant spirits.

The last two scenes of Act ii show how much Manfred's attitudes have developed since the beginning of the play. Again we have spirits that rule the natural world, but these differ from the spirits of Act i, Scene i. Even though Nemesis and the Destinies grudgingly admire Manfred's courage and power, they are completely hostile to mankind. They cynically explain that they support tyrants, sink ships to save only a traitor and pirate, provoke men to revenge, and make mad the wise. Above all, they serve Arimanes, the Persian power of evil. When they gather to celebrate their master, a chorus of spirits tells that Arimanes rules the elements, that he uses tempests, earthquakes, volcanoes, and pestilence to satisfy his wrath against men. His is “the Spirit of whatever is,” for he is the principle of a pessimistic necessity. Clearly, Arimanes and his spirits recall the spirits of the elements in the opening act, but they do not show the variable nature of the comic rhythm. Instead of offering a mixture of blessings and injuries, they offer only the proud hostility of malignant fate. Commentators who have assumed that both sets of spirits are identical have not seen how Byron has developed the play.¹⁵ As the tragic rhythm becomes more dominant, Manfred's view of nature—and, through an indirect perspective, our view of nature—darkens accordingly. All of nature now seems to be transformed by Manfred's suffering. It seems futile and misleading to argue whether or not Byron believed in the determinism Arimanes represents; in the play Byron uses several conflicting beliefs to develop the opposing rhythms.

In response to these spirits, Manfred does refuse to pay homage to Arimanes, claiming that he will not bow until Arimanes bows to “The overruling Infinite—the Maker / Who made him not for worship” (ii.iv.47-48). There is a hint here of a comic openness, a possible transcendence of fate through a loving God. But one must not make too much of this point, since Manfred asserts it merely to flaunt his own pride and his refusal to debase himself before Arimanes. He does not seriously consider help from a forgiving God. In fact, he does not question the First Destiny's assertion, “He is mine”; and when Nemesis says to him at their departure, “Then for a time farewell,” Manfred replies, “We meet then! Where? On the Earth?— / Even as thou wilt” (ii.iv.164-66). Manfred will not grovel before the destinies and spirits, but he seems to accept the tragic fate that they, and possibly higher powers, have ordained for him.

Certainly he accepts the Phantom of Astarte's prophecy that he will die tomorrow, and throughout Act iii he feels a calm, an “inexplicable stillness,” because he knows that his earthly suffering will soon have completed its course. This resignation is still counterpointed by comic rhythms, but for the most part they are only foils to Manfred's tragic close. Most obviously, the Abbot, whom Byron made sympathetic in his second version of the act, speaks of penitence and pardon, the religious and comic breaking of fate through Providence; but Manfred claims that nothing can exorcise his own sense of sin or release him from self-condemnation. He is convinced that his “days are numbered” and his “deeds recorded” (iii.iv.54). Once again, Manfred praises nature's beauty, as he addresses the setting sun, but he does so to bid it farewell. Again, there are minor characters who, like the Chamois Hunter earlier, are resigned to their human limitations, but again Manfred insists that he is of a special order of mortals.

The most interesting use of the comic in Act iii is the meditation that begins the last scene of the play. As Manfred is preparing to die, he pauses to “linger yet with Nature”; and, as he remembers a night-time scene in the Coliseum, he pays his most effective tribute to the comic world that he cannot accept. The passage has been interpreted as “an earthly version of immortality,”¹⁶ but it is not that; it is a celebration of mortality, with its beauty, destruction, change, and continuity held in a momentary balance. Like much in Canto iv of Childe Harold, the passage begins by describing the life and growth of nature that still continues among the ruins of Rome's past; it pointedly juxtaposes life and death, the natural world with the human. Yet Manfred also recognizes that while Caesar's chambers and the Augustan halls have fallen, the “gladiator's bloody circus” ironically still stands, “A noble wreck in ruinous perfection.” The oxymoronic phrases here point up the ambiguous character of these ruins; they claim that man is both nobly powerful and transitory. Such ambiguities are again stressed as Manfred worships the ancient rulers, “The dead, but sceptred, Sovereigns, who still rule / Our spirits from their urns.” These sovereigns are dead, for they are only mortal despite their power; but they are sceptered, since their nobility conferred a metaphorical immortality of reputation and influence. They still rule our lives through their examples and precepts, but they rule from their unavoidable funeral urns. Over all of this scene of contrasts and ambiguities is the rolling moon, which softens the austerity and fills up the gaps of centuries; it makes harmony out of the opposing elements without destroying their opposition. For a few dozen lines, using many techniques (and perhaps the moonlight) of Coleridge's conversational poems, Manfred rejoices in the comic, mortal world without denying its limitations. Then, he is sharply called back to his situation and purpose: “But I have found our thoughts take wildest flight / Even at the moment when they should array / Themselves in pensive order.” This statement pointedly contrasts the comic and tragic rhythms of the play. Manfred considers his preceding meditation a wild flight, which suggests the openness, unpredictability, and—from Manfred's point of view—the escapism of the comic. And he contrasts it with the pensive order of duty, which suggests the coherence, purposiveness, and concentration of the tragic.

Again concentrating on his coming death and still refusing help from the Abbot, Manfred scorns the demon that comes to carry him to damnation. He insists that his mind will be its own punisher since he has made no pacts with devils. But he does not claim complete freedom, since he admits that his “hour is come” and knows that the fate which has forced him to live now gives him death. He dies with stoic courage, and the Abbot dreads to think where the soul has gone. Having completed the earthly term of his suffering Manfred passes into a realm as impenetrable as that which Astarte inhabits.

Essentially Manfred's final tragic attitude resembles that of his opening monologue, since the play, like individual scenes and acts, has moved in a circle. But this attitude has become more certain and more powerful. Through his experiences and rejections of the comic world, Manfred has more completely accepted both the necessity and the dignity of his tragic fate. Through it he has asserted a moral responsibility that cannot be absolved by God or demons, and he has found a coherent movement of life that cannot be broken by the arbitrary powers of spirits, the vagaries of chance, or even his own changing impulses. Through suffering he has found an essential, immutable self that acts in concert with a destiny beyond nature and religion. Thus, he can be proud and strong in his last speeches, and he can conclude with the assertion Byron claimed was necessary to the whole effect and moral of the play: “Old Man! 'tis not so difficult to die.”

Had Manfred accepted the comic view, he would have had to believe that the individual life was not of the highest importance, that it was a minute portion of the general life, which moved through an eternal process of destruction and creation. He would have had to assume a perspective beyond himself and to find the value of his life in a larger context, either in nature (as does the Chamois Hunter) or in Providence (as does the Abbot). Thus he could not have approached the triumphant self-assertion that he makes in his final speeches when he claims that the Mind “Is its own origin of ill and end— / And its own place and time.” This solipsism requires a tragic view because the individual life that it celebrates inevitably closes in death, and the sense of tragic completeness and fulfillment increases the hero's triumph in defeat.

This triumph, however, has required a great sacrifice from Manfred: he has destroyed the part of himself that would have balanced his aggressive egoism. This theme is presented symbolically through the death of Astarte. In Act ii, Scene ii, Manfred recounts his youthful quests in which, already avoiding other men, he expanded first his physical power by testing himself against the wilderness and then his mental power by seeking forbidden wisdom. This account of Faustian striving increases in exultation until it collapses in his confession that he destroyed Astarte, the only person he had loved. Although the manner of this destruction is vague, the sequence of his narrative and the transition, “until,” imply that in some way his solitary, aggressive self-assertion destroyed her. Since she was like him in appearance and mind but was more gentle, pitying, and tender, she seems (apart from the conventionally romantic and autobiographical levels) to represent his feminine alter-ego, his anima, his capacity for communion and love. This masculine and feminine symbolism is obviously traditional (enough so that Byron could occasionally invert it in the comic Don Juan); the most explicit Romantic examples are Blake's sexual forms and Wordsworth's distinction in The Prelude between the gentle Spiritual Love, represented by Dorothy, and the solitary Imagination that seeks the sublime and awful. After the destruction of the feminine Astarte, Manfred cannot possibly experience the world with the openness that the comic rhythm requires, not only because he has lost the only person he has loved but because his intensely masculine egoism has killed his ability to escape from his selfhood. Thus the tragic rhythm of the play presents him in two complementary aspects: as the hero who realizes his immutable self in inevitable and triumphant death, and as the egoist who splits and distorts his psyche in an attempt to experience the power of that self. And in this ambivalent view of Manfred, Byron has shown a profound, complex understanding of the tragic.

The critical apparatus used in this study has not been arbitrarily imposed on Manfred, for it is applicable in varying degrees to most of Byron's major works. Our meaning of the “comic” has often been used in studies of Beppo and Don Juan, and the “tragic” as we have defined it has obvious application to Byron's oriental tales and classical tragedies. Childe Harold could well be studied as an interplay between the two rhythms, with the comic becoming more dominant in the last two cantos; and Byron's Cain, caught between Lucifer's tragic and Adah's comic views, is even more clearly aware of the opposition than is Manfred. Considering how often—and sometimes how loosely—the terms “tragic” and “comic” have been used in discussions of Byron, it is surprising that they have not been applied systematically to Byron's first and most famous play, especially since there has been some general discussion about the genre of that “Dramatic Poem,” as Byron subtitled it. I hope to have shown that a close generic analysis not only determines the general form of Manfred, but also demonstrates that the play is a well-controlled work, with an aesthetic unity that does not depend on whether the play is metaphysically, or even logically, consistent.

Notes

1. Byron the Poet (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), p. 107.

2. The Byronic Hero (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1962), pp. 175-76.

3. Cf. Ward Pafford, “Byron and the Mind of Man: Childe Harold III-IV and Manfred,” SiR [Studies in Romanticism], i (1962), 107, 113, with Robert F. Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 252-57.

4. E.g., W. Paul Elledge, Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. Press, 1968), pp. 81-94, as well as Pafford and Gleckner.

5. Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953), p. 360. Although “rhythm” may seem too much a part of Professor Langer's theory of musical symbolism, it is a precise and suggestive term for discussing Manfred. Unlike the more familiar tragic “vision,” “view,” or “sense,” it focuses on the play rather than on the author's attitudes toward life; and, unlike the more abstract “mode” or “form,” it suggests the affective qualities produced by changing movements that comprise the total form of the play.

6. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1957), p. 208; Dorothea Krook, Elements of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1969), p. 17; Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy (New York: N. Y. U. Press, 1961), p. 41.

7. Langer, pp. 331, 327.

8. Frye, p. 170.

9. Maurice J. Quinlan, in “Byron's Manfred and Zoroastrianism,” JEGP, [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], 57 (1958), 726-738, assumes that both sets of spirits are derived from the attendants of Arimanes in Persian religion, an assumption that I question here and in my later discussion of Act ii.

10. The Works of Lord Byron, rev. and enl. ed., ed. E. H. Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1922), iv, 87. This edition will be used throughout this study, with act, scene, and line numbers cited parenthetically when not indicated by the context.

11. Joseph, p. 107.

12. Peter Thorslev has shown that this frustrated death wish combines the motif of the Wandering Jew with Romantic Weltschmerz (p. 170). I would suggest that it also includes the fixed term of penance common to romances, fairy tales, and religious myths.

13. Similarly, in The Myth of Sisyphus Camus argues that suicide is an extreme acceptance of the absurd, that it is the antithesis of the existential hero's revolt against the absurd (“Philosophical Suicide”). Manfred, however, is not an existential hero in all important respects, even though he has often been called one lately. His belief in a tragic pattern opposes the existentialist's belief that all patterns of inevitability are as illusory as they are comforting.

14. Later there is a more pointed, although more limited, instance of the scapegoat theme when Manfred says to the Phantom of Astarte, “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” (ii.iv.124-26). Bertrand Evens has shown one way that Byron's hybrid villain-hero developed out of gothic melodrama: “Manfred's Remorse and Dramatic Tradition,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], 62 (1947), 752-72.

15. See fn. 9 above. As further suggestion that there are two different sets of spirits, one of Arimanes' spirits does not recognize Manfred when he appears, and a second spirit says generally, “I do know the man— / A Magian of great power, and fearful skill!” These responses do not seem to come from spirits that were controlled by Manfred the preceding night.

16. Pafford, p. 114.