[In the following essay, Sperry places Manfred within the context of Byron's life and career, suggesting that the writing of the play represented for its author a personal catharsis that enabled him to write Don Juan.]

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

W. B. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”

Byron's greatest drama, Manfred, holds an important transitional place within the scope of his career as writer and thinker. It looks back to the third canto of Childe Harold, written, as Byron put it, when I was “half mad … between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies”; and it partakes of that same turbulence and mental anguish—a play “of a very wild, metaphysical and inexplicable kind.”¹ At the same time there is a sense in which it anticipates the poise and self-assurance of Don Juan, the masterpiece the poet was shortly to begin. More than any other of Byron's major works, it is central to what we recognize today as the most remarkable transition in the whole of English Romanticism—a transition that was stylistic, intellectual, and profoundly psychological. As E. E. Bostetter has written, “Manfred is the drama in which Byron symbolically works his way through to mental sanity, to the psychological perspective that made Don Juan possible.”² It is, in short, a play of personal catharsis, a drama, as Harold Bloom has put it, “of the self purged by the self.”³ My purpose in this essay is not to challenge these assumptions, which seem to me persuasively established. It is, rather, to show, within the terms of the play's dramatic structure, that it is possible to go further in defining the nature of that catharsis and the kind of recognition in which the drama culminates.

In considering the place of Manfred within the development of Byron's intellect and genius, it is important to bear in mind from the outset the various phases of composition through which the work evolved. Undoubtedly much of the stimulus for the play was owing to Matthew “Monk” Lewis, who arrived in Switzerland to join Byron's party on Lake Geneva in August, 1816, and who introduced the poet to Goethe's Faust by translating sections of it for him viva voce. Goethe's poem immediately captured Byron's imagination, but it served primarily to crystalize themes and preoccupations that were already powerfully at work. Some years earlier Byron had begun “an unfinished Witch Drama,” a chorus of which he printed in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems (1816) and which, as the “Incantation” or curse with which the first scene of Manfred ends, is in many ways the germ of the completed drama.⁴ By the time of his departure from Switzerland in early October, Byron had finished a draft of the first two acts. The third he composed early the following year in Venice but in a style often markedly at odds with the serious, meditative tone he had so well succeeded in establishing through his handling of Gothic background and natural scenery. In a bit of lively anti-climax, the demon Ashtaroth appears at Manfred's bidding to carry the Abbot of St. Maurice to the top of the Shreckhorn, singing as he goes:

A prodigal son, and a maid undone,
          And a widow re-wedded within the year;
And a worldly monk, and a pregnant nun,
          Are things which every day appear.(5)

Both Gifford and Byron himself recognized the inappropriateness of the act as it stood, and in the spring of 1817 in Rome Byron revised it. In addition to eliminating the comic interlude he made, as Andrew Rutherford has observed, two major changes.⁶ First he transformed the Abbot of St. Maurice from a threatening bigot to a genuinely sympathetic character, one bound by the orthodoxy of his views but nevertheless intent on Manfred's salvation. Second, and more important, Byron was no longer content to allow his hero to expire mysteriously in the arms of his servants, Herman and Manuel. Instead he introduced the grim infernal apparition who arises from the earth in the final scene to claim, like Mephistopheles, the soul of his victim and to precipitate the culmination of the drama.

As we shall shortly see, it is the dramatization of this climactic moment on which so much of the effect of the play depends. What we have, in short, is a work that preoccupied Byron over a substantial period of time and achieved its final form only after several stages of composition and revision.

If the play was long in taking shape in Byron's imagination, there can be no doubt that it articulates more successfully than any of his other dramas a wealth of concern that is both deeply personal and at the same time generic to the condition of the Romantic artist. Indeed it is just the finished structure of the play in its relation to dramatic meaning that has never been examined with the care it deserves. One can say that the play begins from its first seed in Byron's imagination—from the “incantation” or curse that is imposed on Manfred at the end of the first scene. Thereafter we follow the hero through a series of trials in which he is tempted at every stage by opportunities to escape or transmute its effects but only in ways that are inadequate or demeaning. Although it has not been generally observed, the curse motif is fundamental to the action of the two great plays of Byron and Shelley.⁷ Indeed, to study the structure of Prometheus Unbound by comparison with Manfred is to understand how much Shelley was indebted for his own masterpiece to the older playwright and to a drama that, while less systematically articulated than his own, is in some ways richer and more complexly human.

It is clear relatively early in Shelley's drama that the curse Prometheus utters (the recalling of which sets the whole redemptive machinery of the play in operation) is actually an act of moral and psychological self-enslavement. This same realization is fundamental also to Byron's work, but neither at the start of the play nor thereafter is it immediately apparent. Manfred does not curse, rather he is cursed by, his oppressors. At the end of the first scene we see him crushed and helpless while a voice, “baptizing” him “with a curse,” declares it his destiny, like that of Prometheus, “Nor to slumber, nor to die.” (I.i.223, 254) Yet it decrees his punishment by ordaining him to become his own tormentor.

I call upon thee! and compel
Thyself to be thy proper Hell!

(I.i.250-51)

By the end of the play it is precisely the force of this injunction that Byron's hero repudiates. Nevertheless his means for doing so are only gradually earned, and his larger realization is one the work as a whole only imperfectly dramatizes.

From the first the scope and nature of the imprecation remain uncertain. It clearly owes much of its power to Byron's complex feelings concerning his own personal life, to the Calvinist sense of fatality he often felt impending over him. It would, of course, be a mistake to draw too simple an equation between Byron and his hero. At the same time, however, Manfred, as a dramatic creation, obviously draws upon a major part of Byron's character and personal history. In the first scene, the last of the Seven Spirits, the star that rules his destiny, describes his planet as “A wandering mass of shapeless flame, / A pathless Comet, and a curse.” (I.i.117-18) He is an âme damnée, helpless to prevent himself from sweeping others into the destructive orbit of his own passions, a lover whose injuries descend on those who love him, whose “embrace [is] fatal.” (II.i.84, 87) Readers from the poet's day to our own have been unwilling to read the play in isolation from the larger context of the poet's life, or, as Byron himself certainly foresaw, to ignore the autobiographical overtones in such speeches as:

MANFRED.
I say 'tis blood—my blood! the pure warm stream
Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love;

(II.i.24-27)

MANFRED.
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.

(II.iv.120-123)

Such passages are among the most self-consciously confessional that Byron ever wrote. Nevertheless G. Wilson Knight is surely correct when he notes that Manfred's infatuation with Astarte is more than just a reflection of Byron's relationship with Augusta. It is the expression of his disastrous love-life as a whole—the compulsive self-destructiveness that characterized all his affairs and even his marriage.⁸

On the other hand, the curse motif from which the action of the play proceeds is more than merely personal in its implications. As readers from Keats and Shelley to T. S. Eliot have understood, its significance is intellectual and even cultural. Manfred is the imprisoned or self-imprisoned Prometheus, the prey of his own reflections. However, he is also Prometheus in his earlier and more active form, the type of Faustus, the poet-magician, who by his science has gained a measure of control over the spirits of the elements he summons before him at the outset of the play. Indeed the note of melancholy that pervades the drama resounds most clearly in those passages that convey Manfred's disillusionment with his new power and that retain a strikingly modern intonation:

Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

(I.i.10-12)

And they [Manfred's aspirations] have only taught
                                                                                him what we know—
That knowledge is not happiness, and science
But an exchange of ignorance for that
Which is another kind of ignorance.(9)

(II.iv.60-63)

Such speeches suggest more than a vague Romantic ennui at the root of Manfred's discontent. Their deeper meaning is illuminated by the important passage in the final act which Manfred addresses to the sun and which Byron rightly considered “one of the best [speeches] in the thing” and “better than the Colosseum” (the more famous soliloquy, written in the style of Childe Harold, that opens the final scene).¹⁰ Advancing to the window of the hall, Manfred addresses the setting sun for the last time:

                                                                                Glorious Orb! the idol
Of early nature, and the vigorous race
Of undiseased mankind, the giant sons
Of the embrace of Angels, with a sex
More beautiful than they, which did draw down
The erring Spirits who can ne'er return.—
Most glorious Orb! that wert a worship, ere
The mystery of thy making was revealed!

(III.ii.3-10)

The lament is one version of what we recognize today as the central Romantic complaint, similar in kind to Keats's nostalgia for the “awful rainbow once in heaven,” for “mysteries” that have been “Conquer[ed],” measured by rote, and set down “In the dull catalogue of common things.”¹¹ It is a lament for a primitive age of simple wonder and belief, before science and its knowledge replaced the integrity of man's imaginative apprehension with the sharper but divided insights of the modern consciousness. From the outset Manfred's power rests in his “superior science,” (III.iv.115) his ability to summon forth and to command the spirits to whom he nevertheless denies all genuine authority. Yet the longing for something higher to love and worship, for “that which is above,” (II.iv.46) remains; and it is a major irony of the play that, at its conclusion, it is a moot question to what degree Manfred controls the spirits he invokes and to what degree they are, in fact, master over him. Manfred, like Byron's career as a whole, demonstrates the truth that it is one thing to disavow the spiritual powe-rs of this world intellectually and another to establish one's own emotional independence of them.

The loss of “vigor,” the “disease” Manfred decries, reflects the despondency so many of the great Victorians saw, with disapproving eyes, written large in Byron's poetry and which Carlyle in particular analyzed with caustic thoroughness in his important early essay, “Characteristics,” as the modern ailment.¹² In Carlyle's diagnosis, the cause of the disease was attributable to a steady loss of the vigor and spontaneity he associated with man's “unconsciousness”—a loss revealed, in one of its manifestations, by a growing preoccupation with the self.

It is significant that the gift Manfred demands from the spirits in the first scene, the charm they cannot grant him, is “Forgetfulness / … Oblivion—self-oblivion.” (I.i.136, 144) The torment he endures, as he later tells the Chamois Hunter, is the weight of “ages—ages— / Space and eternity—and consciousness.” (II.i.46-47; my italics) It is the ancient Promethean torture adapted to the modern capacity for self-awareness. For as Manfred steadfastly continues to reject every claim that traditional authority can make, he is driven only the more inexorably back upon himself. Yet his salvation—if indeed he finally achieves it—comes, as the structure of the play makes clear, not through the kind of capitulation to which Wordsworth so willingly consented (“I have submitted to a new control”).¹³ It is to be gained in a way that is more purely Romantic—by following the process of negation out to its ultimate conclusion.

Following the pronouncement of the curse in scene one, the remainder of the play, as I have already partly observed, presents a series of alternatives to challenge Manfred's adherence to the via negativa, his loyalty to the “everlasting No.” The process is virtually a kind of Satanic inversion of Christ's temptation on the Mount. Manfred is recalled from the brink of the Jungfrau by the voice of the Chamois Hunter, a figure that appeals to him in friendship and common humanity. However the Chamois Hunter is separated from Manfred by the innocence of his ways, and when he counsels “patience,” Manfred abruptly breaks the human ties between them to insist on his distinction: “Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine,— / I am not of thine order.” (II.i.37-38) Overcome by the beauty of the Alpine valley and its cataract, Manfred summons up the Witch of the Alps, the presiding spirit of the scene. As her connection with the image of the “arch of the sunbow,” the familiar Romantic image of the rainbow, makes clear, she represents the transforming spirit of imagination latent in the landscape. However, when she offers to help Manfred only if he will bow down to her—to acknowledge her as some Wordsworthian or transcendent spirit of beauty—he summarily rejects her. (Like Blake, Byron is insisting here on the primacy of the human powers of imagination). Later Manfred refuses to kneel to Arimanes, the prince of the Destinies, who represents a destructive and grimly necessitarian view of human and world order. Nor in the last act does the Abbot of St. Maurice, preaching a benign god of mercy and urging “penitence and pardon,” succeed in bringing Manfred to submission. Byron's hero rejects allegiance to any and all deities, whether they be pantheistic, Manichean, or Christian.

The exception to this pattern of rejection is, of course, Astarte, the one figure in the play who commands Manfred's devotion. In contrast to the Witch of the Alps or Arimanes, she is a human figure. Yet it is not possible, as some have attempted, to see her in opposition to the more daemonic forces in the play. It is significant that the shape Manfred perceives is only the “Phantom” or apparition of Astarte; and in an important sense it can be said that she is part of the contrivance of the play, the tool of those forces that would use her to hold Manfred in their power. She is, surely, related to the “beautiful female figure” whom the spirits conjure up before him in the first scene and before whom he falls senseless just prior—significantly—to the imposition of the curse. When she appears to him later as Astarte, it is significant that she is summoned before him specifically by Nemesis—the spirit of retributive justice and revenge. She arises from the dead, moreover, to answer the specific questions he addresses to her which have to do with his own sense of guilt and personal remorse. “Forgive me or condemn me,” (II.iv.105) he begs her, a plea she meets with silence. Following her cryptic utterance, “To-morrow ends thine earthly ills,” (II.iv.151) she fades before his parting question, “Yet one word more—am I forgiven?” (II.iv.152), after which Manfred is again “convulsed.” A human and compelling figure, Astarte is nevertheless a servant of the darker agents of the play and the law they uphold—the code of Nemesis, the old law of crime and retribution which, at the very end of the drama, Manfred abjures. If her silence is in some sense a fitting answer to his questioning, she is in all events unable to enlighten him or save him from his own despair.

In coming to terms with Astarte, we are clearly dealing with the deeper levels of Byron's psyche. It was, as we have seen, relatively easy for him to disavow the differing claims of the various religious creeds contending for authority. However it was less simple for him to reject the promptings of his own conscience, particularly in the area where he was most susceptible, the area of his sexual and emotional transgressions. The guilt that is most dangerous and inhibiting is not that imposed from without but that which is self-inflicted. The gods that are the most inexorable and difficult to exorcise are those we set up within ourselves. Manfred is above all an object lesson in these truths.

Manfred's colloquy with Astarte, however, is brief and is, moreover, not the climactic confrontation in the play. It is only with the final scene and the dark, infernal creature who appears, like Mephistopheles, to claim Manfred as his own—the major change Byron made in revising the final act in Rome—that we reach the climax. Largely neglected by past commentators, the scene is actually crucial to interpretation of the drama and illustrates better than any Byron's skillful use of gothic background and the Faustus story to create a wealth of personal, psychological, and moral implication. Hence it is necessary to examine the scene in somewhat greater detail. Interrupted by the reappearance of the Abbot of St. Maurice who has come to renew his entreaties, Manfred, perhaps to frighten him, calls his attention to the menacing shape close at hand which the Abbot can not at first perceive. Here again the question of whether Manfred has summoned the spirit or whether the latter has appeared of his own volition, is left ambiguous.

MANFRED.
Look there, I say,
And steadfastly;—now tell me what thou seest?
ABBOT.
That which should shake me,—but I fear it not:
I see a dusk and awful figure rise,
Like an infernal god, from out the earth;
His face wrapt in a mantle, and his form
Robed as with angry clouds: he stands between
Thyself and me—but I do fear him not.
MANFRED.
Thou hast no cause—he shall not harm thee—but
His sight may shock thine old limbs into palsy.
I say to thee—Retire!
ABBOT.
And I reply—
Never—till I have battled with this fiend:—
What doth he here?
MANFRED.
Why—aye—what doth he here?
I did not send for him,—he is unbidden.
ABBOT.
Alas! lost Mortal! what with guests like these
Hast thou to do? I tremble for thy sake:
Why doth he gaze on thee, and thou on him?
Ah! he unveils his aspect: on his brow
The thunder-scars are graven; from his eye
Glares forth the immortality of Hell—
Avaunt!—

(III.iv.59-79)

Manfred's brief, unnoticed exclamation, “Why—aye—what doth he here? / I did not send for him,” contains a store of meaning on which the significance of the whole drama depends.

Behind the forbidding aspect of the fiend, one can perceive the familiar features of those two great Romantic archetypes, Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles. Nevertheless it is impossible not to sense that for Byron's contemporaries and for modern readers the description the Abbot renders would have a further significance. Wrapt in a mantle, outcast and scarred with dreadful wounds, the form inescapably suggests the figure Byron himself had created in so many earlier poems, from Lara and Conrad to the Giaour and Childe Harold. The form who, in the Abbot's words, “stands between / Thyself and me” can only bring to mind the most successful persona in Romantic poetry—the Byronic hero. What the climax of Manfred dramatizes is Byron's confrontation with his own persona, his latent realization of the danger of personal domination by the character of his own creating who comes, somewhat like Frankenstein's monster, to turn upon his master.¹⁴ As a number of his contemporaries and the poet himself recognized, the danger was a real one. In May, 1816, Sir Walter Scott wrote that “Lord Byron … has Child Harolded himself and Outlawd himself into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination.”¹⁵ The awesome spirit who claims to be “The genius of this mortal” (III.iv.81) represents a whole dramatic character and pose that had for some time been assuming an uncomfortable reality.

Some years ago Bertrand Evans, in an informed and skillful essay, proposed a solution to the problem of Manfred's “unexplained” remorse.¹⁶ The hidden guilt and dark self-accusation were, he showed, only données of a well-established dramatic convention which Byron inherited. Evans' proof for his contention, his discussion of a host of characters and plots from earlier plays, seems irrefutable. Nevertheless we know today that in developing the character of Manfred and the larger figure of the Byronic hero who overshadows him, Byron was not simply working within the terms of familiar formulas.¹⁷ If he appropriated a convention, he made it his own. Not only did he come to personify the convention; in many ways he lived it. The poet who blazoned his injuries before all Europe in the third canto of Childe Harold was also, as he confessed, “half-mad” at the time he wrote it. If he bitterly resented his ostracism from English society, he was also obsessed by the knowledge of his own offenses and his sense of personal guilt. Manfred depicts the initial stages in the exorcism of that obsession.

The climax of the drama, Manfred's confrontation with the fiend, is really an aspect of Byron's confrontation with himself. In the apparition of the devil we see revealed the power that for some time had alternately served and dominated Byron's poetic character and its compulsive needs—the spirit of guilt and self-recrimination that was a vital part of his Calvinist background and upbringing. It is significant that in rejecting the claims of his adversary, Manfred appeals for authority to the older, prelapsarian world he had earlier invoked:

                                                                                                    my past power
Was purchased by no compact with thy crew,
But by superior science—penance, daring,
And length of watching, strength of mind, and skill
In knowledge of our Fathers—when the earth
Saw men and spirits walking side by side,
And gave ye no supremacy.

(III.iv.113-19)

In this former world, men and spirits stood on equal footing, were scarcely separable from each other. Knowledge was the product of love and wonder, of intuition and imaginative discovery, before the spirits were differentiated, not only from man, but from each other, as light and darkness, truth and error, credal right and wrong.

Coming to demand the soul of his victim, however, the spirit rests his claim on the assumption of a fallen world with its law of sin and retribution, the very imperatives Manfred proceeds to deny:

SPIRIT.
But thy many crimes
Have made thee—
MANFRED.
What are they to such as thee?
Must crimes be punished but by other crimes,
And greater criminals?—Back to thy hell!
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.

(III.iv.121-32)

In recent years it has been customary to take the passage as a kind of existential affirmation—Manfred's insistence on the right to judge himself, to ordain and bear a punishment heavier than any external authority might impose. Yet the speech seems to go further in questioning the whole rule of crime and punishment, the inflexible law of Nemesis, of endless reprisal, of the debt unending, “still paying, still to ow” (Paradise Lost, iv.53).

In one sense Manfred's answer to the spirit who would convey him to the infernal regions is the claim of prior judgment: “my self am Hell.” (Paradise Lost, iv.75) Yet the passage is shot through with recognitions of the inconsequence and futility of the law of retribution—“Must crimes be punished but by other crimes, / And greater criminals?”—and of the need for some end of the cycle of retaliation.¹⁸ Thus Manfred's words, “What I have done is done,” recall Iago's final speech, “What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.” (Othello, V.ii.302-03) In Shakespeare's play Iago's lines define the last extremity of evil. By contrast, Manfred's lines ring with a kind of lonely heroism. They suggest a man who, confronting the reality of his own misdeeds, has found it in his heart, if not to absolve, at least to release himself, a man who has achieved liberation not by self-repudiation but by going to the bottom of the night of his own experience and somehow reemerging on the other side. In this connection the stage direction following Manfred's speech seems particularly significant: “[The Demons disappear.]” Although the relationship has never been observed, the effect seems remarkably similar to the way the furies vanish following their unsuccessful temptation of Shelley's hero towards the end of the first act of Prometheus Unbound. Beyond the ultimate notion of man's self-enslavement, the two scenes share the impulse to affirm a higher law of mercy and forgiveness in place of the code of retaliatory justice. In some sense it can be said that Shelley's play begins where Byron's ends.

Manfred is indeed a play of deep personal and psychological catharsis. It is an exercise in sustained negation, the renunciation of all authority but that most innate to the self that is demanded of the modern poet. It enacts a ritual exorcism of the spirits, including, finally, the familiar spirit that had become most intimate to the success and makeup of the poet's role and character—the Byronic hero. It is only when we go on to Byron's later work, to the comic irony and detachment of Don Juan, that we can judge the necessity of this divestiture and the liberation it provided. Manfred is Byron's Prometheus Unbound, his Man Freed. Yet we miss the point of the play if we fail to see that this is true at a profoundly human level, that it represents Byron's renunciation of a role he dramatized time and again with superb success but only at the cost of surrendering to his own fiercest compulsions.

There are, I realize, certain obvious objections to such an interpretation. If Manfred is a drama of spiritual and psychological emancipation, why, it may be asked, did Byron choose the form of tragedy? If the hero succeeds in banishing the chief spirit who seeks to claim him, why does he die at the end of the play? And what is the meaning of his final words, on which Byron declared “the whole effect and moral of the poem” depended:¹⁹ “Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die”? (III.iv.151)

In seeking to answer such questions, one must recognize that, by contrast with the superior prescience of Shelley's masterpiece, Manfred is tentative and exploratory. As the history of its composition reveals, it developed in form and meaning gradually during a period of critical transition in the evolution of Byron's genius, and it reflects the real strains of that development. It is a work that is in nature genuinely heuristic for the reason that it expresses, more clearly than any other work Byron composed, his efforts to come to terms with the quality of his own talent, its strengths and limitations, by an action of dramatic self-confrontation and appraisal. It suggests his struggle to transform himself by casting off a role he was no longer able or willing to play. For Byron the death of his hero was a psychological, if not a dramatic, necessity if he was to achieve the detachment and irony that mark his later work. Yet the task was not a simple one, for he was in effect killing off part of himself—his intense involvement with the complex of guilt and self-recrimination that had provided the vital impulse of much of his earlier work. Like Goethe's Werther, Manfred projects an aspect of his author's psyche. In this sense it may be true, as Andrew Rutherford has written, that Manfred “cannot be said to represent humanity or the mind of man—he is an exceptional, unique phenomenon, his problems are peculiar to himself, and their solution (if there is one) has no bearing on the situation of nous autres.”²⁰ Nevertheless this need not mean we are unable to sympathize fully with him or that the drama that involves him fails to depict truths of profound human relevance. Manfred is the character through whom Byron plunges furthest into the core of his own experience, his heart of darkness, systematically deprived of any spiritual support or consolation. That Byron emerged from the task so triumphantly is owing partly to his salutary power of introspection and partly to the fact that he was able to bid farewell to a part of himself with understanding and compassion.

Notes

1. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1898-1901), IV, 49, 54-55.

2. The Romantic Ventriloquists (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963), p. 278. My essay is especially indebted to Bostetter's fine discussion.

3. The Visionary Company (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., N. Y., 1961), p. 242.

4. See Letters and Journals, IV, 54n.; and The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: John Murray, 1898-1904), IV, 92n.—hereafter cited as Poetry. In a letter to Byron of April 17, 1821, Shelley mentions “the curse in ‘Manfred’” as one of the three finest poetical passages in all of Byron's work. Shelley's editor, Frederick L. Jones, has asserted that “Manfred (1817) has no curse” and believes, incorrectly, that Shelley was thinking of Childe Harold, IV, 135. See The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Jones (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 283 and n.

5. Poetry, IV, 122n. Citations from Manfred are to this text.

6. Byron: A Critical Study (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), p. 87.

7. Newman Ivey White has called attention to the metrical and stanzaic similarity between the spelling lyrics of the Seven Spirits in the first act of Manfred and those of the four voices in the first act of Prometheus Unbound as well as to their somewhat similar function (Shelley [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940], II, 134).

8. See Lord Byron's Marriage (New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 127-28. Knight observes of Manfred's “I loved her, and destroyed her!” (II.ii.117): “That tells the story of more than one romance.” (p. 127)

9. Both Keats and Shelley were struck by the first of these passages. (See The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958], I, 179; and an early draft of the Preface to Epipsychidion, The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, the Julian ed. [London: Ernest Benn, 1926-30], II, 375). Despite Eliot's hostility to much of Byron, the resemblance in style and tone between such passages and Eliot's later work has been astutely observed by Ian Jack (English Literature 1815-1832 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963], p. 62).

10. Letters and Journals, IV, 147.

11. Lamia, ii.231ff.

12. One might observe in passing that there is something slightly unfair about the way Carlyle, throughout much of his writing, alternately develops Byron's insights into the troubles of the modern psyche and berates him as a cause and manifestation of the disease. See, for example, his caricature of Byron's “Life-philosophy” in the hideous screeching of the hyperborean ghost—“‘Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm meeserable! Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z: Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm meeserable!’”—in Past and Present (Complete Works [New York: Collier, 1901], XX, 151). Carlyle's ambivalent attitude toward Byron has been discussed by Charles Richard Sanders in “The Byron Closed in Sartor Resartus,” SIR [Studies in Romanticism], III, 77-108.

13. “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle,” 1.34.

14. It is noteworthy that it was during the same summer of 1816, when Byron began Manfred, that Mary Shelley discovered the idea for her novel, which White says (I, 444) originated in a conversation between Byron and Shelley.

15. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, D. Cook, W. M. Parker and others (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1932-37), IV, 234. Quoted by Rutherford, p. 49.

16. “Manfred's Remorse and Dramatic Tradition,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], LXII (1947), 752-74.

17. Peter Thorslev, for example, has written that “Manfred is more than merely a remorseful Gothic Villain. He is the Byronic Hero in the process of maturing, of taking on a philosophical and psychological depth which he certainly did not have in Childe Harold I or II or in the romances.” (The Byronic Hero [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962], pp. 167-68)

18. Discussing the political argument of Childe Harold III, Jerome McGann has written that “true liberty will only be achieved when men choose not to exact retribution for wrongs. Only thus can the cycle of vengeance be broken.” (III, 84). (Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968], p. 53) Manfred reveals Byron's struggle to achieve this realization within the terms of his own personal life.

19. Letters and Journals, IV, 157.

20. Rutherford, p. 89.