In our first day of discussion on Byron's Manfred, I was probably a little too dismissive of Byron's text and the character of Manfred. Byron himself referred to Manfred as "too much in my old style." In the same letter to his publisher, he also referred to himself as "a devil of a mannerist," and it's hard not to find Manfred's world-weariness wearying, and his self-centeredness bordering on narcissism exhausting. It is in fact easy to dismiss Manfred and Manfred as overheated, bloated, self-indulgent nonsense, the whinings of an elitist prig who has everything and yet feels everyone is against him, who was born to title, wealth, fame, and luxury and yet acts like a petulant child when the world has the audacity to not bend to his will.
Such a dismissal would be wrong. There is much beauty and power in Manfred, but as many in class noted, that beauty and power seems to come in isolated scenes, brief passages, and even single lines, but that the overall effect was unclear. "My pang shall find a voice," Manfred tells the Witch of Atlas, though what his pang is and whether it does find a voice isn't clear. But it is not a criticism of Manfred or Manfred that his "pang" remains hidden and inarticulate. How many of us know how to name our "pang," and how many of our "pangs" find voices? Manfred's boast, like so many that he makes, appears to be aimed as much at persuading himself as at persuading others. When Manfred admits to the Abbot, "I could not tame my nature down," he appears at first to be confessing a weakness or flaw, but he soon turns to more conventional Byronic language:
I could not tame my nature down; for he
Must serve who fain would sway—and soothe, and sue,
And watch all time, and pry into all place,
And be a living lie, who would become
A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such
The mass are; I disdain’d to mingle with
A herd, though to be leader—and of wolves.
The lion is alone, and so am I. (III.i.116-123)
Of course, that Manfred begins by seeing social relations as a taming of one's nature, a taming of that which is real and authentic within oneself, suggests that there was never a moment of confession, and yet behind all of the boasts is something like confession or perhaps something like longing and pleading. To Byron's readers past and present the above passage would have been very familiar. First, in countless other Byron texts, the hero/anti-hero is either presented as or presents himself in similar terms. Conrad, the embittered pirate in Byron's The Corsair is described as "Warp'd by the world in Disappointment's school" and as "Too firm to yield, and far too proud to stoop" to social expectations. Second, Byron had used very similar language to describe himself. At the end of Canto the Third of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (published about a year before Manfred), Byron clearly speaking in his own voice bids farewell to his daughter Ada and to English society:
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd
To its idolatries a patient knee, --
Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles, -- nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.
I have not loved the world, nor the world me, --
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, -- hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful, or weave
Snares for the failing: I would also deem
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem, --
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream. (1049-1066)
The arrogance of Byron's speakers just a couple of days ago might have struck me as petulant and ridiculous, and it became easy for me to dismiss this voice of aggrieved genius for the class-inflected privilege it seemed to represent. But to do so misses Byron's great power. "My pang shall find a voice," Manfred boasts, and perhaps part of the pang is the isolation of the thoughtful in a thoughtless world, the outcast we make of genius or even competence, our willingness to disregard the "experts" and to avoid all traffic in ideas. Haven't we all at one time or another, or perhaps most times, or perhaps all times, thought that we "stood among" the crowd "but not of them," and that our thoughts "were not their thoughts"? For many of us, don't we feel that it is through what Manfred calls "superior science--penance--daring--/And length of watching--strength of mind--and skill/In knowledge" (III.iii.115-117) that we have earned the privilege to stand among the crowd but not of them, and that education, reading, reflection, contemplation, hard work, have given us thoughts that are not "their thoughts"?
In addition, both Byron's and Manfred's open embrace of their isolation and loneliness reminds us that they didn't choose isolation and loneliness, a recognition that adds immense poignancy to Manfred's encounter with the phantom of his beloved Astarte at the end of the second act. The action of the play (if it can be called action) has seemingly turned on a series of refusals and rejections, and readers are left to struggle for an answer to what ought to be a simple question (at least dramaturgically)--what is Manfred's motivation? What does Manfred want? From the beginning of the play, it is clear that he wants to see Astarte, his beloved who has died and for whose death Manfred feels some responsibility. Putting aside what some readers find to be most interesting (i.e. the prurient autobiographical elements in the play), Manfred's desire to see Astarte is the longing that is at the center of the play. In light of the above passages, which focus our attention on the speakers' loneliness and isolation--their sense of living in a world that is beneath them, that misunderstands them, that they cannot understand themselves--Manfred's longing to see Astarte becomes less a stage of grief and more a desire for community and likemindedness. "Speak to me," Manfred pleads repeatedly with the Phantom of Astarte, "though it be in wrath," as if the silence of the grave is the silence of Manfred's people-less world. It matters little what she might say, only that she speaks, only that she in dialogue provides him with a community. "I know not what I ask, nor what I seek," Manfred admits, but "I would hear yet once before I perish/The voice which was my music" (II.iv.132-135). The desire to hear her voice, to engage in conversation, suggests that what Manfred wants is a presence and a present, a living now in contrast to the dead past and the equally dead future. She speaks, but only to assure him that his life is at an end. In response to his pleas for condemnation, forgiveness, and assurance, she offers only, "Farewell."
Like Manfred, we might all be ready to invoke high-mindedness and the desire to avoid the taint of the world's ignorance and hypocrisy when the world seems so perversely opposed to its own interests. "I have not loved the world, nor the world me/But let us part fair foes" seems a perfectly logical response to a world that not only has failed to recognize our genius, but which appears to want to embrace all that is opposed to superior science, penance, daring, length of watching, strength of mind, and skill in knowledge. At this particular moment, and this posting covers our class discussion of Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Byron's response to the world's judgment, hypocrisy, and indifference seems less like the petulant whining of a spoiled elite and more like the only path available.
Of course, it isn't, and Byron's friend Percy Shelley offers us another path. It is, in comparison to Byron's ostentatious resignation, a more difficult path. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley sought to make sense of the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which began with revolutionary hopes of liberty for all and ended with, as summarized by one of the spirits in Manfred, "repairing shatter'd thrones,/Marrying fools, restoring dynasties,/Avenging men upon their enemies" (II.iii.62-64). Shelley, through the figure of Prometheus, imagines a very different response from Manfred's. Prometheus, of course, is the mythical Titan who steals fire from Mount Olympus to give to humans and for this act is chained by Jupiter, his adversary, to a mountain where he undergoes a variety of torture, physical, mental, and emotional. "No change, no pause, no hope" (I.24) is how Prometheus describes his fate at the beginning of the play, "pain, pain ever, for ever" (I.30). Shelley's play opens with Prometheus angrily denouncing Jupiter, lamenting his torture, and concluding with the wish of seeing Jupiter crushed. But just on the verge of further denouncements of Jupiter, Prometheus pauses:
And yet to me welcome is day and night,
Whether one breaks the hoar frost of the morn,
Or starry, dim, and slow, the other climbs
The leaden-coloured east; for then they lead
The wingless, crawling Hours, one among whom
— As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim —
Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood
From these pale feet, which then might trample thee
If they disdained not such a prostrate slave.
Disdain! Ah no! I pity thee. What ruin
Will hunt thee undefended through wide Heaven!
How will thy soul, cloven to its depth with terror,
Gape like a hell within! I speak in grief,
Not exultation, for I hate no more,
As then ere misery made me wise. The curse
Once breathed on thee I would recall. (I.44-59)
Prometheus begins nearly in joy ("welcome") only to turn to his hate and his desire for revenge ("trample thee"). As Prometheus is imagining trampling the prostrate Jupiter, something curious happens. He pauses on the word "disdain," and then rejects his revenge fantasy with a simple utterance, "I pity thee." That revenge fantasy, the imagining of his nemesis Jupiter as "a prostrate slave," is a very Shelleyan moment. In "A Defense of Poetry," Shelley claims that imagination is the salvation of the world, and not just the Romantic creative imagination, but our ability to "imagine intensely and comprehensively," to put ourselves "in the place of another and of many others." "The great secret of morals," Shelley writes, "is love; or a going out of our nature," and therefore the "great instrument of moral good is the imagination." Prometheus, in imagining Jupiter's punishment, also imagines Jupiter's pain and suffering. Not disdain but pity is what the sympathetic imagination counsels. In the very next sentence, Jupiter, the "cruel King" only a few lines before, is now seen in an extraordinary act of sympathetic imagination as "undefended," vulnerable and at risk, his soul "cloven to its depth with terror." Faced with even the imagined suffering of another that might be brought about by his words ("curse"), Prometheus decides to "hate no more," and seeks to recall the curse. For all practical purposes, by line 59 of the first act, the play is over--Prometheus is unbound, because through his sympathetic identification with suffering (the same sympathy that was at the foundation of his "crime") and his rejection of hate he has removed Jupiter's power over him. Later in the first act, after Prometheus hears his curse, he responds, "Were those my words . . . It doth repent me . . . I wish no living thing to suffer pain" (I.302-305). The truth of this moment is sadly familiar, played out in countless personal and national traumas, both in the inflicting of pain and suffering and in the transcendental acts of pity and forgiveness that is their response.
The rest of the play works out the consequences of Prometheus' sympathetic imagining, but not before letting us see the extent of pain and suffering that Jupiter attempts to inflict. The furies who visit Prometheus tempt him with the suffering and wrongheadedness of the world, the kind already rehearsed in Manfred and from which Manfred turns away to a life of isolation. But Prometheus offers us another model. The last Fury to visit Prometheus details the seeming impossibility of improving the world:
FURY: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.
PROMETHEUS: Thy words are like a cloud of wingèd snakes;
And yet I pity those they torture not. (I.621-633)
The Fury offers a compelling and remarkably timely (or timeless?) assessment of the world where "all best things are thus confused to ill," where hope for change is simply absurd in a world where the "good want power," and the "powerful goodness want." This view of the world looks very similar to Byron's, where knowledge leads to despair and suffering to nihilism. Interestingly and provocatively, though, Prometheus is touched by the "suffering" of those who do not understand that others suffer. In other words, Prometheus pities those without imagination, or those who cannot sympathize (or even see) the suffering of the world. The Fury is so confounded by Prometheus' response that he gives up and leaves.
At the conclusion of the play, Demogorgon, the spirit of fate or necessity that drives change in the world, summarizes the difficult Shelleyan way:
This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism,
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And 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.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. (IV.554-578)
Confronted with a world too ignorant and foolish for our efforts, a world worthy only of our disdain, Byron offers us brooding exile and isolation. Shelley offers us an impossibly difficult alternative: "To suffer," "To forgive," To defy," "To love and bear," "to hope," all in the infinitive to suggest that these actions are ongoing and timeless and also never finished. Prometheus doesn't forgive Jupiter after he is unbound and freed from suffering. Prometheus is unbound and freed from suffering after he forgives Jupiter. Prometheus never stops defying Jupiter, but he does stop hating him.
At the end of the sonnet "England in 1819," Shelley imagines that all of world's evil and despotism are "graves" from which a glorious spirit "may/Burst to illumine our tempestuous day" (13-14). The conditional "may" and the belatedness of this imagined triumph (after twelve lines of brutality) are in Prometheus Unbound transformed into present tense, "Love . . . springs/And folds over the world its healing wings," but it is a present that can only be brought about through struggle and failure, the wreck of hope that will be graves out of which Hope may burst to illumine our tempestuous day. To counter "Destruction's strength" and the "disentangled doom," we have "Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance," which are repeated like incantations and spells. Gentleness, virtue, wisdom, and endurance. Suffering, forgiveness, defiance, love, and forbearance. Hopelessly Romantic? Perhaps, though, there is little that is romanticized or of present comfort in Shelley's long arc of history argument, especially now when that arc seems more like a death spiral or at the very least perversely indirect. But as John Stuart Mill describes in his autobiography, life is not about achieving all that one desires--he imagines that possibility and realizes that if all his goals were achieved overnight he would fall into despair. Rather, our home is with infinitude, to paraphrase Wordsworth, with something evermore about to be. To suffer, to forgive, to defy, to love, to bear, to act with gentleness, virtue, wisdom, and endurance. I repeat these words as if they were incantatory and talismanic, needed now to bar the pit over Destruction's strength. To suffer, to forgive, to defy, to love, to bear--this is difficult; this is alone life, joy, empire, and victory.
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