SOURCE: “The Diabolical Discourse of Byron and Shelley,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 47-65.

[In the following essay, Brewer asserts that a complimentary interest in Satan as a literary presence inspired a number of the great poetic works of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley.]

1

Shelley's praise of Byron's Cain was immediate and enthusiastic. In a 12 January 1822 letter to John Gisborne, he asked: “What think you of Lord Byron now? Space wondered less at the swift and fair creations of God, when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at the late works of this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body.”¹ Elsewhere, Shelley used such terms as “apocalyptic” and “revelation” to describe Byron's mystery play.² Part of Shelley's enthusiasm for Cain could be explained by the fact that Cain treated themes he himself had explored in Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, and On the Devil, and Devils. And Byron's use of Lucifer in Cain would also have intrigued Shelley, who, like Byron, enjoyed speculating about the nature and character of the arch-fiend. It seems likely, moreover, that Cain was at least partly inspired by the poets' discussions of metaphysical and religious questions during their meetings in Switzerland and Italy. What might be called Byron's and Shelley's diabolical discourse began when Shelley sent Byron a copy of his highly controversial Queen Mab (possibly in 1813)³ and did not end until the last year of Shelley's life, when both Byron (in The Deformed Transformed) and Shelley (in his translation of scenes from Faust) found themselves responding imaginatively to Goethe's Mephistopheles.

Thomas Medwin was among the first to see the parallels between Shelley's visionary Queen Mab and Cain, particularly in Shelley's and Byron's descriptions of the vastness of space.⁴ In Queen Mab Shelley writes:

          Earth's distant orb appeared
The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;
          Whilst round the chariot's way
          Innumerable systems rolled,
          And countless spheres diffused
          An ever-varying glory.
          It was a sight of wonder

(1.250-256)⁵

Byron has Cain describe a similar view:

Cain. As we move
Like sunbeams onward, [the earth] grows smaller and
          smaller,
And as it waxes little, and then less,
Gathers a halo round it, like the light
Which shone the roundest of the stars, when I
Beheld them from the skirts of Paradise:
Methinks they both, as we recede from them,
Appear to join the innumerable stars
Which are around us; and, as we move on,
Increase their myriads.

(2.1.34-43)⁶

But while Cain and Queen Mab both deal with space travel, the results of the journeys in these works are radically different. Ianthe learns from her interstellar flight with Queen Mab that “when the power of imparting joy / Is equal to the will, the human soul / Requires no other Heaven” (3.11-12). In contrast, Lucifer teaches Cain that “the human sum / Of knowledge [should be] to know mortal nature's nothingness” (2.2.421-22) and leads Cain to despair. Behind both works is an interest in the discoveries of nineteenth-century science, particularly in astronomy, but while Shelley's perception of scientific knowledge and voyages through space is positive, Byron is more wary: rather than being uplifted, Cain is cast down by his vision of the cosmos. In Byron's words, by showing Cain “infinite things,” Lucifer suggests Cain's comparative “abasement.”⁷ Knowledge, in Cain, is dangerous; what Cain learns in act 2 leads to the tragic violence of act 3.

It is clear, then, that Byron, while willing to borrow the idea of space travel from Shelley's Queen Mab, uses this device to draw different conclusions. Shelley's utopian belief that “A garden shall arise, in loveliness / Surpassing fabled Eden” (Queen Mab, 4.88-89) contrasts radically with Byron's vision, in Cain, of a universe in which everything progressively degenerates (2.2.67-74). But before too much emphasis is put on this difference in the poets' visions, it is important to remember that Queen Mab was published in 1813, Cain in 1821: the mature Byron, in effect, is arguing with a very young Shelley. It also should be noted that Queen Mab was both pirated and reissued in 1821, and that it was raising considerable interest in England at about the time Byron was composing Cain.⁸

In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley refined the utopianism of Queen Mab: Prometheus, unlike Ianthe, pays a very high price for his wisdom. Moreover, Prometheus Unbound confronts the problems of man's self-defeating urge to hate and denounce the God of this world, the urge which leads Prometheus to enshrine and then curse Jupiter, and which inspires Cain to strike out in frustration and kill his brother. Byron's reservations about the meliorism presented in Queen Mab do not seem to extend to Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, published seven years later: Byron, Shelley wrote, “was loud in his praise of ‘Prometheus.’”⁹ Although Cain differs from Prometheus Unbound in many respects, a comparison of the two works is enlightening, and serves to show how Shelley and Byron continued the conversation begun in Venice on “God, freewill and destiny; / Of all that earth has been or yet may be / All that vain men imagine or believe, / Or hope can paint or suffering may atchieve” (“Julian and Maddalo,” 42-45).

The determination of Byron and Shelley to write poems about Prometheus probably dated from the summer of 1816—Byron told Medwin that Shelley translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound for him in Switzerland, and, soon after, Byron composed “Prometheus.”¹⁰ Writing to John Murray, Byron claimed that Aeschylus's play was an important influence on much of his poetry: “The Prometheus—if not exactly in my plan—has always been so much in my head—that I can easily conceive its influence over all or anything that I have written.”¹¹ Byron composed his “Prometheus” in 1816, without the benefit of having read Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1819), and he tended to think of Prometheus bound rather than unbound, defiant rather than pitying, a static “symbol” and “sign” (“Prometheus,” 45) rather than a being capable of change. Byron's Prometheus has a certain moral authority, strong enough to make Jove's lightnings tremble (34), but it is not clear that his rebellion will ever accomplish anything. Similarly, Manfred's “Promethean spark” (Manfred, 1.1.154) is never used to threaten Arimanes's dark reign; Manfred's goal proves, in fact, to be self-destruction. In The Prophecy of Dante Byron writes that even when a poet seeks to become a “new Prometheus of new men, / Bestowing fire from heaven” (4.14-15), this gift will be repaid with pain, and there is no indication that any other outcome is possible. Cain is yet another potential Prometheus, an aspirer to better things for himself and mankind, a would-be rebel against divine authority, and a protester against death. But Byron presents him differently from his other Promethean figures: Cain is a portrait of a metaphysical rebel who becomes an ironic, rather than heroic, figure. Wolf Hirst describes the irony of Cain's act of violence succinctly: “The irony of Cain's surrender to fury, to irrationality, after vainly pleading with his brother for reason, is enhanced by the circumstance that Cain's murderous frame of mind was caused by Lucifer, the advocate of reason.”¹² While Byron's other Prometheus-figures rely on their moral superiority to their tormentors to make them heroic, if bound, personages, Cain finds himself on the defensive, a criminal who can no longer judge his creator without seeming hypocritical. The simple conflict between the righteous rebel and the tyrannical and unjust God becomes in Cain a complex confrontation between a man who has condemned and then caused death and a Jehovah who is invisible and therefore inscrutable. Cain never learns the lessons of Shelley's Prometheus: that anger and resentment are self-destructive and that the only thing that will save mankind is love.

One looks in vain through Byron's works for the kind of positive apocalypse that is found in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, in which the universe is revitalized and changed for the better. In fact, Byron's apocalyptic view, as presented in “Darkness” and in Lucifer's speeches to Cain, has to do with a constant loss of energy, a kind of entropy which makes each race of intelligent beings less vital and noble than the race before.¹³ The successive falls mount up: the superior race of Pre-Adamites are annihilated and replaced by the less intelligent Adam and Eve, who fall from paradise; their son, Cain, is banished from Eden and, in Byron's Heaven and Earth, his offspring the Cainites are annihilated by the flood. This is not, as Byron suggests in his preface to Cain, simply a “poetical fiction” to help Lucifer make his case: the notion that the history of the universe is marked by a constant downward spiral is an integral part of the myth he presents in Cain and elsewhere. It is a situation that man can deplore but not reverse. While Adam's fatalism seems abject, Cain's rebellion is clearly counterproductive, and neither attitude will lead to paradise regained. In Cain, of course, Byron was to some extent bound by the text of Genesis. But it remains, I think, significant that Byron chose this biblical context for an exploration of Prometheanism or, in other words, that he chose a context in which Promethean aspirations cannot be realized without violating the integrity of the original text. Shelley's vision of Prometheus unchained and the world renewed seems to have no place in Byron's poetry.

It would be incorrect to say, however, that Byron's and Shelley's metaphysical outlooks have nothing in common. One should not forget that Shelley's apocalypse is not final, and that future falls are possible even after the apocalypse of Prometheus Unbound. Demogorgon's speech at the end of the drama is revealing:

                                        if, with infirm hand, Eternity
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
          The serpent that would clasp her with his length—
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.

(4.565-69)

Shelley's “serpent” does not disappear after Prometheus's triumph, and there is a possibility that “Eternity” will become “infirm,” that entropy will affect Shelley's cosmic myth as well as Byron's. Moreover, both poets show that violence is a misguided response to injustice and tyranny, whether divine or temporal. To Shelley, violence makes the rebel morally equivalent to the tyrant, and Prometheus's hatred must give way to pity before he can end Jupiter's evil reign. Byron, on the other hand, shows that violence, directed against a god like Jehovah, tends to miss its target (the creator-tyrant) and hit an innocent bystander (Abel) instead. And in Cain, as in Prometheus Unbound, love is presented as a viable alternative to the barren and self-destructive man-versus-God scenario. Prometheus recognizes the importance of Asia's love—“Most vain all hope but love” (1.808)—and Asia becomes a vital part of his unchaining and the renewal of the universe. But while Prometheus realizes the necessity of love, Cain tends to view Adah as basically irrelevant to his goals and aspirations, and leaves her to be with the skeptical Lucifer, a being devoid of love. This is a crucial mistake: apart from Adah, Cain despairs and ultimately turns to violence. In these works love constitutes man's only hope for salvation. Separated from Asia, Prometheus remains bound and tortured; while away from Adah, Cain becomes bitter and potentially murderous. Although Cain does not explore the possibility of a redeeming apocalypse, it, like Prometheus Unbound, shows the error of a rebellion based on hatred, and the necessity of love as a counterbalance to man's tendency towards despair when he is faced with human suffering and divine injustice.

Another resemblance between Cain and Prometheus Unbound has to do with the psychological nature of the metaphysical rebellions that Byron and Shelley are describing. Lucifer, Cain says, speaks to him “of things which long have swum / In visions through” (1.1.167-68) his own mind, and Adah is quick to warn Cain of demons who tempt man with his “own / Dissatisfied and curious thoughts” (1.402-3). Jehovan can be seen as a projection of Cain's pessimistic speculations, merely articulated by Lucifer, much as Jupiter can be interpreted as a vision of tyranny and injustice created by Prometheus. And if both Cain and Prometheus create, out of their own minds, the problems which beset them, then they, not simply some exterior beings such as Jehovah and Jupiter, are to blame for their sufferings. Cain's banishment to the land east of Eden and Prometheus's binding are caused by failures of the imagination: Cain's failure to understand the true nature of death, which he ends up causing, and Prometheus's foolish decision to enthrone Jupiter. The fallen nature of reality is not caused solely by “something out there,” but by the erring minds of men.

Moreover, both Cain and Prometheus have antitypes, Adah and Asia, female reflections of themselves. Adah, of course, is Cain's twin sister and wife, and Asia is presented as a “golden chalice” into which part of Prometheus's “being overflowed” (1.809-10). As James Rieger notes, the reverse of incest (self-love) is fratricide (self-hatred): “The mirror connects incest with fratricide in the … sense that both are born out of self-love. Narcissus presses his lips to the looking-glass; Cain smashes it with a rock.”¹⁴ In a sense Cain, like Prometheus Unbound, can be seen allegorically, the difference being that while Prometheus is able to disarm his negative mental imagery with the self-love personified by Asia, Cain allows his nihilistic vision to create in him the violent self-hatred symbolized by his murder of his brother. It is significant, moreover, that both Cain and Prometheus withdraw from society at the end of the dramas, Prometheus to his visionary cave (3.3.10-12) and Cain to the lands east of Eden. Although metaphysical rebels, they tend towards introversion, a characteristic more often associated with poets than with revolutionaries. Thus Shelley and Byron use their closet-dramas to explore the psychological ramifications of the Prometheus and Cain myths. Cain's view of a Jehovah who creates only to destroy is never actually verified by anyone other than Lucifer, who can only be seen as an unreliable source, and may well tell us more about Cain's perspective on reality than about the universe or its creator. Perhaps Cain makes his own universe in a negative way, as Prometheus positively recreates his world.

Like Shelley's Prometheus, Cain has some of the attributes of a poet, but he is clearly a fallen poet, his vision corrupted by his rage and despair.¹⁵ Of course Byron's vision of Cain as poet predates his reading of Prometheus Unbound—in a letter to James Hogg written in 1814 Byron speculates on Cain's status as a poet:

Milton's Paradise Lost is, as a whole, a heavy concern; but the two first books of it are the very finest poetry that has ever been produced in this world—at least since the flood—for I make little doubt that Abel was a fine pastoral poet, and Cain a fine bloody poet, and so forth; … Poetry must always exist, like drink, where there is a demand for it. And Cain's may have been the brandy of the antediluvian, and Abel's the small [?] still.¹⁶

The Old Testament notes that among Cain's descendants are Jubal, the first man to play the harp and organ, and Tubal-Cain, the first artificer in brass and iron (Genesis 4:21 and 4:22). In Paradise Lost, Michael warns Adam of Cain's descendants, artisans and inventors who spurn God:

Those Tents thou sawst so pleasant, were the Tents
Of wickedness, wherein shall dwell his Race
Who slew his Brother; studious they appear
Of Arts that polish life, Inventors rare,
Unmindful of their Maker, though his Spirit
Taught them, but they his gifts acknowledg'd none.

(3.607-12)

The aspiring, inquisitive Cain is the predecessor of those artists who seek to supplant the Creator by becoming creators in their own right. In Adonais, written during the summer before Byron's composition of Cain, Shelley presents himself as a poet who simultaneously resembles Cain and Christ: “his branded and ensanguined brow, / … [is] like Cain's or Christ's” (Adonais, 305-6). To both Byron and Shelley, Cain is an exemplar of the self-destructive side of the poetic temperament, as represented by such figures as Manfred and the self-defeated Rousseau of The Triumph of Life. Every poet has Cain's ability to destroy and Christ's ability to redeem, and the tragedy of Cain is that the protagonist tries to change the world in a positive way but only succeeds in committing the first murder.¹⁷ Like a rebel artist who rejects traditional religious beliefs in order to create his own world view, Cain turns his back on his father's religious orthodoxy and tries to define the nature of the universe for himself. But Cain's perspective is affected by “the corrupting blight of tyranny”¹⁸ that Shelley claimed made Tasso a lesser poet than Dante. In the universe in which he finds himself, Cain can only perceive Infernos. Cain is similar to the type of poet described in Grimm's Correspondance, quoted by Byron in his letters: “a poet, or … a man of genius in any department, … must have ‘une ame qui se tourmente, un esprit violent’.”¹⁹ According to this description, continues Byron, he himself would be a poet “per excellenza,” since he possesses a self-torturing soul and a violent spirit. Like many of the Romantic poets, Cain is more interested in the rebellious Lucifer, with his Satanic pride and resolute heroism, than in the tyrannical Jehovah, who inspires simple-minded devotion from Adam and Abel. He also has a powerful imagination capable of transcending everything Lucifer shows him in their tour through the universe. Cain tells Lucifer: “thou show'st me things beyond my power, / Beyond all power of my born faculties, / Although inferior still to my desires / And my conceptions” (2.1.80-83). Even before Lucifer describes his vision of the universe, Cain has imagined it (1.167-68). In fact, Cain's imagination is Napoleonic in its ambition; he is tortured by “Thoughts which arise within [him], as if they / Could master all things” (1.177-78). Despite the universal scope of his imaginative vision, Cain is capable of extemporizing a paean to Adah, in which he says that she is superior to “the bird's voice— / The vesper bird's, which seems to sing of love” (2.2.263-64). Cain is a fancier of “the lights above us, in the azure, / Which are so beautiful” (1.280-81) and looks to the stars for beauty as he aspires to greater things than a farmer's lot. Cain has the temperament of a poet who wants the world to match his imaginative conceptions—without that, he deems life not worth living.

As Byron noted in a letter to John Murray, Cain goes into a rage inspired by “the inadequacy of his state to his Conceptions,” which expresses itself in violence directed against “the author of Life” rather than against the actual victim, Abel.²⁰ The injustice that most outrages Cain is that he cannot recreate the world to match his own “conceptions.” Shelley's Prometheus, who is responsible for Jupiter's oppressive rule, succeeds in transforming his vision of reality, in eventually presiding over a creation which does, in fact, fulfill his aesthetic requirements. Cain cannot, however, overcome his vision of a Jehovah-dominated world, and therefore his poetic idealism becomes a chimera that haunts him, that reduces him to rage against the more prolific, if less imaginative, creative power of the “Author of Life.”

In his ultimate frustration, and violent reaction to what he perceives as an unjust universe, Cain has far more resemblances to Beatrice Cenci than he does to Shelley's Prometheus. We know that Byron had read The Cenci at least by 10 September 1820,²¹ so it is possible that Shelley's tragic heroine influenced his conception of Cain. In A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age, Alan Richardson draws some useful parallels between The Cenci and Cain. For example, Beatrice and Cain are at first “young, morally integral, idealistic, but critically lacking in self-awareness,”²² but they are soon affected by older, sophisticated beings who tempt them to commit acts of violence. The result of the influence that Cenci and Lucifer have on the young protagonists is a loss of innocence and a growing self-consciousness: this self-consciousness, Richardson notes, “pays for its emergence with a loss of integrity,”²³ and both Beatrice and Cain commit crimes which violate the ideals they once held sacred. The journey to self-consciousness, in The Cenci and Cain, is symbolized by crossing an abyss.²⁴ In Beatrice's case, the abyss is found at the spot where she plans to have Cenci ambushed:

                                        there is a mighty rock,
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulph, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall.

(3.1.247-55)

The disorienting image of the abyss is also used in Cain, in which Lucifer conveys Cain across “The Abyss of Space,”²⁵ taking him on a voyage which is both liberating and completely alienating. In The Cenci and Cain, Shelley and Byron explore the problems confronting Romantic idealists, the disillusionment, pain and injustice that can lead beings like Beatrice and Cain to act exactly like those they most detest, as Beatrice reacts to Cenci's violence against his children by conspiring to assassinate him, and Cain protests against the Jehovah who dooms man to death by committing murder.

2

Byron's presentation of Lucifer, the other metaphysical rebel in Cain, may owe a great deal to Shelley's influence. Both poets had a half-whimsical interest in the devil and delighted in attributing demonic qualities to each other. In “Julian and Maddalo” Shelley compares the discourse between himself and Byron to the discussions that “The devils held within the dales of Hell” (41), and Byron, inspired by a quotation from Goethe's Faust, nicknamed Shelley “the Snake.”²⁶ In his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, Trelawny relates the story of Byron nicknaming Shelley “the Snake” and adds: “Byron was the real snake—a dangerous mischiefmaker.”²⁷ Coincidentally, both Shelley and Byron were inspired, as young men, to imitate a satire written by Coleridge and Robert Southey entitled “The Devil's Thoughts” (1799).²⁸ Shelley composed “The Devil's Walk: A Ballad” in 1812, and Byron, in the same year, wrote “The Devil's Drive.” Both poems use the idea of the devil visiting England as a vehicle for radical social and political satire. Byron's interest in portraying the devil went, of course, far beyond this relatively juvenile effort: the coldly intellectual Lucifer of Cain, the haughty, aristocratic Satan of The Vision of Judgment and the mephistophelean Stranger/Caesar of The Deformed Transformed all serve to illustrate his continuing fascination with the arch-fiend. Shelley presented diabolical beings in his Byronic Peter Bell the Third, in the fragmentary prologue to Hellas, and in his humorous essay On the Devil, and Devils, as well as in other works. In his translation of scenes from Goethe's Faust, Shelley depicted Mephistopheles brilliantly, and one can certainly see his Cenci as a type of Satan. Although often tongue-in-cheek, the poets' common interest in demonology is reflected in many of their works, and may well have helped shape Byron's Lucifer.

Both Shelley and Byron parted company with Milton in their refusal to identify the Devil with the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve. As Shelley writes in his essay On the Devil, and Devils, the transformation of the serpent of Genesis into the Devil of Christian mythology is a willful misreading of the Bible: “The Christians have turned this Serpent into their Devil, and accommodated the whole story to their new scheme of sin and propitiation.”²⁹ Byron's Lucifer takes pains to disabuse Cain of any notion that he might be implicated in the serpent's crime: “I tell thee that the serpent was no more / Than a mere serpent / … Thy / Fond parents listen'd to a creeping thing, / And fell” (1.231-42). In removing the Devil from the story of man's fall, Shelley and Byron remain consistent with the actual text of Genesis, and suggest that man himself, not a demon, is to blame for his expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The fact that Byron's Lucifer did not lead Adam and Eve into temptation allows him to approach Cain with a certain degree of self-righteousness; it also makes original sin a part of God's creation, not something imported into Eden by an evil demon, since the tempter is a serpent created by God, and Adam and Eve are God's creations as well. In On the Devil, and Devils Shelley challenges the reader to rethink the notion of a God who is both omnipotent and benevolent by questioning the idea that the Devil can be blamed for all evil. Shelley writes that Christians

have tortured themselves ever to devise any flattering sophism, by which they might appease [God] … endeavoring to reconcile omnipotence, and benevolence, and equity, in the Author of an Universe where evil and good are inextricably intangled and where the most admirable tendencies to happiness and preservation are for ever baffled by misery and decay. The Christians therefore, invented or adopted the Devil to extricate them from this difficulty.³⁰

Similarly, Byron's Lucifer tells Cain not to use him as a scapegoat for the evil that God the creator has made:

          if he gives you good—so call him; if
Evil springs from him, do not name it mine,
Till ye know better its true fount; and judge
Not by words, though of spirits, but the fruits
Of your existence, such as it must be.
One good gift has the fatal apple given—
Your reason:—let it not be over-sway'd

(2.2.454-60)

But although Shelley's heterodox opinions probably influenced the speeches of Byron's Lucifer, it would be difficult to separate Shelley's heresies from Byron's. In Shelley's “Julian and Maddalo,” both Julian and Maddalo delight in diabolical conversations, and one gathers that Shelley and Byron encouraged one another to make speculations which would be considered heretical by many of their contemporaries. And although they pursued these speculations with some interest, they did not take the concept of hell entirely seriously. For example, Byron professes to doubt the existence of eternal punishment in The Vision of Judgment even though “one may be damn'd / For hoping no one else may e'er be so” (106-7), and, in a letter dated 10 April 1822, Shelley disputed the idea that “after sixty years of suffering … we [are] to be roasted alive for sixty million more in Hell.”³¹ Both poets seem, then, to have suspected that hell and the devil were superstitions, fictions which were created to make evil a place and an entity separate from heaven and God.

Besides Shelley's and Byron's conversations about the Devil, the portrait of Ahasuerus in Queen Mab may also have had an influence on Byron's portrayal of Lucifer. Shelley's Ahasuerus, after being cursed by Christ, begins his wanderings in the spirit of defiance:

                              But my soul,
From sight and sense of the polluting woe
Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer
Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven.
Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began
My lonely and unending pilgrimage,
Resolved to wage unweariable war
With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl
Defiance at his impotence to harm
Beyond the curse I bore.

(7.192-201)

Byron's Lucifer expresses similar sentiments when he describes his “unweariable war” with Jehovah:

I have a victor—true but no superior.
Homage he has from all—but none from me:
I battle it against him, as I battled
In highest heaven. Through all eternity,
And the unfathomable gulfs of Hades,
And the interminable realms of space,
And the infinity of endless ages,
All, all, will I dispute!

(2.2.429-36)

These immortal beings seem to exist solely to oppose the divine rulers of creation in a war that seems both endless and futile, and Shelley's and Byron's portraits of these two metaphysical rebels underline the uselessness as well as the admirable tenacity of Ahasuerus's and Lucifer's defiance of heaven. Whatever sympathy we may have for the rebels' viewpoints, they do not present perspectives on reality that are helpful to either Ianthe or Cain. The Fairy waves her wand and Ahasuerus disappears as a “phantasmal portraiture / Of wandering human thought” (7.274-75), a desolate dream which is replaced by a vision of a much brighter future. Likewise, Lucifer's world view is negative and counterproductive: it leads to Cain's frustration and his murder of Abel, a murder which makes Cain recognize that he has been influenced by “a dreary dream” (3.378). While Jehovah may be a tyrant, and while Christianity itself may have serious flaws, eternal hatred of the reigning divinities is not seen as a viable stance in either Queen Mab or Cain. Ianthe can escape Cain's bitterness because she, unlike Cain, can look toward the future with hope. While both Shelley and Byron are capable of presenting divine injustice and human suffering in a very pessimistic way, Shelley's futurism gives Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound positive conclusions, whereas Byron's Cain ends in virtual despair. Although Lucifer may have many admirable qualities, his relentless skepticism leads Cain to an act which is as irrevocable as it is tragic.

As they developed their revisionist views of the devil, Shelley and Byron tried to determine the nature of his powers. New astronomical studies shaped their speculations, and their devil became, as a result, something of an astronaut. In On the Devil, and Devils, Shelley considers the problem of a devil who has the job of doing evil in innumerable worlds:

It is discovered that the earth is a comparatively small globe, in a system consisting of a multitude of others, which roll round the Sun; and there is no reason to suppose but that all these are inhabited by organized and intelligent beings. … There is little reason to suppose that any considerable multitude of the planets were tenanted by beings better capable of resisting the temptations of the Devil than ours. But is the Devil, like God, omnipresent? If so he interpenetrates God, and they both exist together. …³²

Similarly, Byron's Lucifer professes himself ready to struggle against Jehovah throughout the vast universe, over which they both reign (2.2.392). The earth becomes a tiny part of a war that stretches across infinity and eternity, and man, who imagines himself the center of the struggle between good and evil, begins to seem almost insignificant. Thus the devil attains God's power of omnipresence, becoming, in this respect, God's equal. The recent discoveries by astronomers, Byron and Shelley suggest, further bring into question the orthodox views of the devil.

The idea that God and the devil work in a sort of partnership, God creating man to be burned by the devil in hellfire, is found in both Shelley's essay On the Devil, and Devils, and Byron's Vision of Judgment, as well as in Cain. In Shelley's words, “These two considerable personages are supposed to have entered into a sort of partnership, in which the weaker has consented to bear all the odium of their common actions.”³³ Satan and the archangel Michael are seen as friends with “political” differences in The Vision of Judgment (Stanza 62), in which God's minions and the devil cooperate in trying to decide the fate of George III. In Cain Lucifer makes his relationship with God mysterious and chastises Cain for wishing to know “the great double Mysteries … the two Principles” (2.2.404), but he does agree that he and Jehovah are “as brethren” (2.2.381) and that they reign together (2.2.392). That there is, in fact, an understanding between Jehovah and Lucifer is indicated by what happens to Cain: Lucifer puts the would-be rebel in the state of mind that leads him to kill Abel, and Jehovah promptly sends down his angel to pronounce sentence on the first murderer. In order to further antagonize Cain, moreover, Jehovah spurns his sacrifice. The kind of partnership described in Shelley's On the Devil, and Devils, in which the devil leads man astray so God can condemn him, also seems present in Cain.

Thus Shelley's views on the devil and Byron's presentation of Lucifer reveal the poets' desire to subvert and even poke fun at the orthodox Christian belief in the archfiend. Both Shelley and Byron were inspired by Milton's Satan, but neither poet was blinded by Satan's heroic stature. As Shelley wrote, Satan has the “taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement” (preface to Prometheus Unbound), and Byron's Lucifer, who professes himself unable to love, has similar flaws. According to Richardson, “Lucifer belongs to the tradition of demonic seducers exemplified by Satan, Iago, and the Witches of Macbeth.”³⁴ But, nevertheless, in refusing to accept blame for man's fall and arguing against the idea of an omnipotent and benevolent Jehovah, Lucifer expresses many of the poets' irreverent notions. In an 11 April 1822 letter to Horace Smith, Shelley wrote that if he had any influence on Byron, he would certainly “employ it to eradicate from his great mind the delusions of Christianity, which in spite of his reason, seem perpetually to recur, & to lay in ambush for the hours of sickness & distress.”³⁵ While he did not succeed in banishing all of Byron's Christian beliefs, he did seem to have an effect on Byron's conception of the devil. But whereas Shelley simply mocks popular notions of the devil in his On the Devil, and Devils, in Cain Lucifer is taken more seriously: his nihilism, his belief in man's nothingness, leads Cain to violence and misery.

In some ways, On the Devil, and Devils has more in common with Byron's The Vision of Judgment than it does with Cain, although both The Vision of Judgment and Cain were written during the latter half of 1821. Like Shelley's On the Devil, and Devils, The Vision of Judgment is deflationary rather than tragic in its implications, seeking to question traditional Christian beliefs through irony and humor. On the other hand, Lucifer is one of the intellectual cherubs, not simply a common devil pandering to man's base appetites, or a restrained, gentlemanly personage like the urbane Satan of The Vision of Judgment. As such, he presents more of a threat to the poetic, aspiring Cain than would a demon who, in Byron's words, promised Cain “kingdoms, etc.”³⁶ Although his discussions with Shelley probably influenced Byron's idea of the devil, in Cain he takes his conception of the archfiend one step further, presenting a demoniacal intelligence capable of perverting the Promethean aspirations of a would-be metaphysical rebel. In part, Lucifer leads Cain to despair by showing him the “high, / Intelligent, good, great, and glorious” (2.2.66-67) beings of the past, who were destroyed; these noble victims demonstrate, Lucifer suggests, the destructive nature of Jehovah, and the ultimate futility of man's aspirations. Significantly, in his “Prologue to Hellas” (written October 1821) Shelley seems to realize the potency of this kind of argument, and puts it in the mouth of his Satan, who points to the ruin of Greece and uses the fact of Greece's fall from its golden age to argue against the possibility of its return to greatness. Christ responds to Satan by dismissing this vision, which “seest but the Past in the To-come” (“Prologue to Hellas,” 161).³⁷ In Shelley's view, the future is not condemned to repeat the past, and later descendants of Adam and Eve may still succeed in recreating their world. But, while Shelley's and Byron's outlooks for the future differed, they seemed to agree that the real threat to modern man comes not from a devil with horns and a forked tail, but from the nihilistic despair a limited rationalism such as Lucifer's can inspire.

It is significant that in Shelley's last year both he and Byron wrote fragments which were influenced by Goethe's characterization of Mephistopheles in Faust: Shelley composed a relatively free translation of scenes from Faust in the spring of 1822, and the Stranger/Caesar figure of Byron's The Deformed Transformed (written in early 1822) is clearly mephistophelean.³⁸ Shelley's translation of Faust altered the original German, as Timothy Webb writes in The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation, to add a new quality to Faust which has “the effect of establishing Mephistopheles as a gentleman of fashion.”³⁹ The Stranger of The Deformed Transformed also has a gentlemanly, even snobbish quality:

Arnold. I said not
You were the demon, but that your approach
Was like one.
Stranger. Unless you keep company
With him (and you seem scarce used to such high Society) you can't tell how he approaches;
And for his aspect, look upon the fountain,
And then on me, and judge which of us twain
Looks likest what the boors believe to be
Their cloven-footed terror.

(1.1.93-101)⁴⁰

Thus the poets' interest in the figure of the devil, manifested in their 1812 imitations of Coleridge's and Southey's “The Devil's Thoughts,” continued to the end of their relationship, when Shelley's and Byron's fascination with Goethe's Mephistopheles led to their writing two intriguing, if fragmentary, works. Unfortunately their “Julian and Maddalo”-style conversation on “God, freewill and destiny” was interrupted by Shelley's death, which was soon followed by Byron's—we will never know how or if it would have continued. But there can be little doubt that Byron's and Shelley's diabolical discourse helped inspire some of their most important works.

Notes

1. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2:376. This edition will be abbreviated as PBSL in the following notes.

2. PBSL, 2:388.

3. For evidence about when Byron received Queen Mab, see Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1976), p. 244.

4. Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford U. Press, 1913), p. 334.

5. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shelley's poetry are taken from Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977).

6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Byron's works are taken from the Oxford Authors Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford U. Press, 1986) and Byron. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 5 vols. (Oxford U. Press, 1980-86).

7. Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Harvard U. Press, 1973-82), 9:53. Henceforth Byron's Letters and Journals will be abbreviated as BLJ.

8. See Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 14n, and Shelley's 16 June 1821 letter to John Gisborne, PBSL, 2:300-1.

9. PBSL, 2:345.

10. Thomas Medwin, Medwin's “Conversations of Lord Byron,” ed. Ernest J. Lovell (Princeton U. Press, 1966), p. 156.

11. BLJ, 5:268.

12. Wolf Z. Hirst, “Byron's Lapse into Orthodoxy: An Unorthodox Reading of Cain,” Keats-Shelley Journal (1980): 153.

13. See Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism (Cambridge U. Press, 1984), pp. 146-47, in which he compares “Darkness” with Prometheus Unbound: “‘Darkness’ reads almost like a point-by-point refutation of the great apocalyptic speeches at the end of Prometheus Unbound.” Of course since Byron wrote “‘Darkness” well before Shelley composed Prometheus Unbound, one could not argue that Shelley's lyrical drama actually influenced Byron's earlier poem.

14. James Rieger, The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: George Braziller, 1967), p. 198.

15. A short discussion of the biblical and Miltonic references to Cain as artist can be found in Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero (U. of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 94.

16. BLJ, 4:84.

17. For a provocative discussion of Cain's process of self-definition, see Leonard Michaels, “Byron's Cain,” PMLA 84 (1962): 74.

18. PBSL, 2:122.

19. BLJ, 8:41.

20. BLJ, 9:54.

21. BLJ, 7:174 and n.

22. Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (Pennsylvania State U., 1988), p. 4.

23. Richardson, p. 14.

24. Richardson, p. 115.

25. Oxford Authors Byron, p. 901.

26. Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 103.

27. Trelawny, p. 310, n. 17.

28. See C. Darrel Sheraw, “Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and the Devil,” Keats-Shelley Journal 33 (1972): 6-9.

29. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (London: Ernest Benn, 1926-30), 7:104.

30. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 7:89.

31. PBSL, 2:407.

32. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 7:97.

33. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 7:94.

34. Richardson, p. 61.

35. PBSL, 2:412.

36. BLJ, 9:53.

37. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 3:15.

38. See Robinson, p. 213.

39. Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 186.

40. The Poetical Works of Byron, ed. Robert F. Gleckner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 723.