Byron and Shelley: Radical Incompatibles

BYRON: [Hamlet] is weak; so miserably weak as even to complain of his own weakness. He says,

“The time is out of joint – O cruel spite,

That ever I was born to set it right.”

And yet he is always boasting and bragging of his own powers, and scorning every one else, and he swears he will sweep to his revenge, “with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love.” For revenge was his love. But in truth he loved it, Shelley, after your own heart, most platonically; for his heart is too faint to win it fairly, and he contents himself with laughing at himself, mocking his own conscious cowardice, and venting his spleen in names, instead of doing anything like a man. So irresolute is he, that he envies the players, he envies Fortinbras, Laertes, any one that can do any thing. Weak, irresolute, a talking sophist. Yet – O I am sick of this most lame and impotent hero!

SHELLEY: And yet we recognise in him something that we cannot but love and sympathise with, and a grandeur of tone which we instinctively reverence.[1]

If this conversation did not take place, it should have. Is Byron, in talking of Hamlet, holding the mirror up to Shelley, up to himself, or up to them both? Whichever of the two, and whether Shelley senses what he’s implying or no, Shelley will have none of it. With “And yet …” he seems to concede all Byron’s points, but is still convinced that Byron has got Hamlet wrong. Their two worlds run parallel, never meeting.

By the end of the dialogue, Shelley having talked for pages in defence of Hamlet, Byron has fallen asleep.

Shelley held two views of Byron. Firstly an ideal, versifiable though not verifiable, which he tried to will Byron into living, and secondly one taken from the life, fit for prose only.

The one is man that shall hereafter be;

The other, man as vice has made him now.

Queen Mab IV.166-7; PoS 1: 306.

Here he is writing to Peacock in mid-December 1818, from Venice, about the prose Byron:

[...] the Italian women are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon; the most ignorant the most disgusting, the most bigotted, the most filthy. Countesses smell so of garlick that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, L[ord] B[yron] is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He allows fathers & mothers to bargain with him for their daughters, & though this is common enough in Italy, yet for an Englishman to encourage such sickening vice is a melancholy thing. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait & phisiognomy [sic] of man, & do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he dissaproves, [sic] but he endures. He is not yet an Italian & is heartily & deeply discontented with himself, & contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair?

LPBS 2: 57

Shelley, a bit out of character, assumes here the role of morally fastidious patriot, chiding his fellow-countryman for letting the side down. If ever Byron became an Italian, Shelley would confine him to the realm of prose for ever. That would be a Byron about whom he would not be able to write poetry.

But here is part of Lines written among the Euganean Hills, a poem dating from only two months earlier. It is addressed to Venice, and the “tempest-cleaving swan” in the eighth line is Byron, that city’s most famous expatriate:

Perish – let there only be

Floating o’er thy hearthless sea

As the garment of thy sky

Clothes the world immortally,

One remembrance, more sublime

Than the tattered pall of time

Which scarce hides thy visage wan; –

That a tempest-cleaving Swan

Of the songs of Albion,

Driven from his ancestral streams

By the might of evil dreams,

Found a nest in thee; and Ocean

Welcomed him with such emotion

That its joy grew his, and sprung

From his lips like music flung

O’er a mighty thunder-fit

Chastening terror: – what though yet

Poesy’s unfailing River,

Which through Albion’s winds forever

Lashing with melodious wave

Many a sacred Poet’s grave,

Mourn its latest nursling fled?

What though thou with all thy dead

Scarce can for this fame repay

Aught thine own? oh, rather say

Though thy sins and slaveries foul

Overcloud a sunlike soul?

As the ghost of Homer clings

Round Scamander’s wasting springs;

As divinest Shakespeare’s might

Fills Avon and the world with light

Like Omniscient power which he

Imaged ’mid mortality;

As the love from Petrarch’s urn

Yet amid yon hills doth burn,

A quenchless lamp by which the heart

Sees things unearthly; – so thou art,

Mighty Spirit – so shall be

The City that did refuge thee.

lines 168-205; PoS 2: 436-7

Shelley creates here an idealising vocabulary, through which his prose Byron may be viewed from a safe distance. Driven from his ancestral streams / By the might of evil dreams is a poetic way of saying that Byron had been beastly to his wife, and had felt the scandal to be bad enough to force him out of England. Though thy sins and slaveries foul / Overcloud a sunlike soul means Byron’s life in Venice is a non-stop sex orgy. That which sprung / From his lips like music flung / O’er a mighty thunder-fit, / Chastening terror is Childe Harold IV (it hardly describes Beppo). But when on May 30th 1818 Peacock had written to him, “I have almost finished Nightmare Abbey. I think it necessary to ‘make a stand’ against the encroachments of black bile. The fourth canto of Childe Harold is really too bad. I cannot consent to be auditor tantum of this systematical ‘poisoning’ of the ‘mind’ of the ‘Reading Public’ (Letters 1: 123), Shelley had replied, on December 17th or 18th of the same year:

I entirely agree with what you say about Childe Harold. The spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked & mischievous insanity that ever was given forth. It is a kind of obstinate & selfwilled folly in which he hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises. For its real root is very different from its apparent one, & nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt & desperation.

LPBS 2: 57-8

The passage quoted above, about Byron’s debauches, now follows. The Byron who wrote Childe Harold IV was far from Shelley’s ideal Byron: among other things, he’d borrowed ideas – indeed, ideals – from Shelley, and perverted them into their opposites. Here is a passage about the sublime disinterestedness of Nature, from Queen Mab (1811):

Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power,

Necessity! thou mother of the world!

Unlike the God of human error, thou

Requirest no prayers or praises; the caprice

Of man’s weak will belongs no more to thee

Than do the changeful passions of his breast

To thy unvarying harmony; the slave,

Whose horrible lusts spread misery o’er the world,

And the good man, who lifts with virtuous pride,

His being, in the sight of happiness

That springs from his own works; the poison-tree,

Beneath whose shade all life is withered up,

And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords

A temple where the vows of happy love

Are registered, are equal in thy sight:

No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge

And favouritism, and worst desire of fame

Thou knowest not: all that the wide world contains

Are but thy passive instruments, and thou

Regard’st them all with an impartial eye,

Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel,

Because thou hast not human sense,

Because thou art not human mind.

VI.197-219; PoS 2: 329-30

Human love, and human destiny, may be ruled by an unfair circumstance, but superhuman Nature remains above and beyond all: the poison-tree and the oak are equal in her sight. Here is what Byron changes the idea into in Childe Harold IV:

 Few – none – find what they love or could have loved,

 Though accident, blind Contact, and the strong

 Necessity of loving, have removed

 Antipathies – but to recur, ere long,

 Envenomed with irrevocable wrong;

 And Circumstance, that unspiritual God

 And Miscreator, makes and helps along

 Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,

Whose touch turns Hope to dust – the dust we all have trod.

 Our life is a false Nature – ’tis not in

 The harmony of things – this hard decree,

 This uneradicable taint of Sin,

 This boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree,

 Whose root is Earth – whose leaves and branches be

 The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew –

 Disease, death, bondage – all the woes we see,

 And worse, the woes we see not – which throb through

The immedicable Soul, with heart-aches ever new.

CHP IV.125-6

Byron’s idea that only unfairness and poison rain on men from on high, from the unspiritual God Circumstance, is quite opposed to Shelley’s interpretation of life’s ultimate calm. For Byron there is no oak to balance the picture – only the Upas, the poison-tree. The sins and slaveries foul of which trigger this pessimism come, Shelley hints, from depths too horrid in Byron the tempest-cleaving swan to be written about. The metaphor of Byron as swan must have been hard to reconcile in his mind with such contortions and corruptions, but he had faith. For Shelley the poet, Byron was one in whom “The sense that he was greater than his kind/ Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind/ By gazing on its own exceeding light” (Julian and Maddalo, lines 50-2; PoS 2: 666).

... and this was not insincere flattery on Shelley’s part. Byron was, Shelley thought, greater than his kind, and ought to control himself more successfully. He writes politely, in the three-line fragment which is all we have of his poem To Byron:

O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age

Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,

Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?

Shelley, Complete 569

With him, Shelley, present, perhaps Byron might realise his true potential. After all, the wicked, mischievous, and insane Childe Harold IV was a very different poem from the love-suffused Childe Harold III, in the genesis of which he, not the gross and despairing sensualist Hobhouse (see below), had assisted.

Shelley admired much of Byron’s other poetry, and seems to have imagined a proprietorial relationship with some of it. On April 26th 1821, Byron wrote to him, aware of his idealising tendency:

You want me to undertake a great Poem – I have not the inclination nor the power. As I grow older, the indifference – not to life, for we love it by instinct – but to the stimuli of life, increases. Besides, this late failure of the Italians has latterly disappointed me for many reasons, – some public, some personal.

BLJ 8: 104

Byron claims that he, too, is a disappointed idealist. Would he have written “a great Poem” if the Italians had been more worthy of his ideals? Would he have fucked fewer Venetians? Does he think The Prophecy of Dante (discontinued, he asserts, because of the failure of the Neapolitan revolution of early 1821, and because of the caution shown about it by his friends the Gambas), to be the “great Poem” he might have written?

Shelley answered, on July 16th 1821, urging him still further:

I still feel impressed with the persuasion that you ought – and if there is prophecy in hope, that you will write a great and connected poem, which shall bear the same relation to this age as the “Iliad”, the “Divina Commedia”, and “Paradise Lost” did to theirs; not that you will imitate the structure, or borrow from the subjects, of any of these, or in any degree assume them as your models. You know the enthusiasm of my admiration for what you have already done; but these are “disjecti membra poetae”[2] to what you may do, and will never, like that, place your memory on a level with those great poets. Such is an ambition (excuse the baseness of the word) alone worthy of you. You say that you feel indifferent to the stimuli of life. But this is a good rather than an evil augury. Long after the man is dead, the immortal spirit may survive, and speak like one belonging to a higher world. But I shall talk bombast, when I mean only to tell a plain truth in plain words.

LPBS 2: 310

William Gifford could not have expressed it better.

Two years earlier Byron had protested to Murray, hearing that Ugo Foscolo had made the same pretentious demand on him, that he was already writing a great poem – Don Juan (Don Juan III, IV and V were not yet out when Shelley wrote the above) (BLJ 5: 105 [letter to Murray, April 6th 1819]). On August 10th of the same year, at Ravenna with his friend, Shelley wrote to his wife as if Byron were at last doing as he wished:

He has read me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan, [this seems to be Canto V] which is astonishingly fine. – It sets him not above but far above all poets of the day: every word has the stamp of immortality. – I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with whom it is worth contending. This canto is in style, but totally, & sustained with incredible ease & power, like the end of the second canto: there is not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be cancelled: it fulfills in a certain degree what I have long preached of producing something wholly new & relative to the age – and yet surpassingly beautiful. It may be vanity, but I think I see the trace of my earnest exhortations to him to create something wholly new.

LPBS 2: 322-5

There are more jokes in Don Juan V than there are in all of Shelley’s writing, but you would not know from this letter there were any in it at all: Shelley may be deceiving himself. His admiration seems genuine, but is it based on an understanding of the poem he praises? Could Shelley actually read Byron? His reported attitude to comedy – that its spirit was “perverted” (see below) – must surely have intervened between him and a full appreciation of Don Juan, at least.

Byron, by contrast, rarely praised Shelley’s poetry, and never betrayed any inkling that he had an ideal Shelley in his mind, moral, poetical, or social, which was perpetually betrayed by the reality. Byron took people as they came. Medwin reports his high opinion of Shelley: “There’s Shelley has more poetry in him than any man living; and if he were not so mystical, and would not write Utopias and set himself up as a Reformer, his right to rank as a poet, and very highly too, could not fail of being acknowledged” (235). But he diverted the energy he might have spent on promoting his friend’s poetry into defending his moral reputation – a reputation which in private he, however, held in no high regard.

There is comedy in the double face he had to keep up, on the one hand in correspondence with Shelley, and on the other with Shelley’s enemies. He was forced into a strange hypocrisy, by the need, on the one hand to keep in with Shelley, and on the other to keep in with his more conservative London friends. The problem surfaced early in the matter of who was to read the proofs of Childe Harold III. Byron seems to have told Shelley that he wanted him to read the proofs: evidence is in a letter from Shelley to Murray of October 30th 1816:

Dear Sir / I observe with surprise that you have announced the appearance of Childe Harold & the Prisoner of Chillon for so early a day as the 23^d of November. I should not do my duty to Lord Byron who entrusted me with the Mss. of his Poems, if I did not remind you, that it was his particular desire that I should revise the proofs before publication. – When I had the pleasure of seeing you in London, I think I stated his Lordship’s wishes on this subject to you, remarking at the same time that his wishes did not arise from a persuasion that I should pay more attention to its accuracy than any person whom you might select; but because he communicated it to me immediately after composition; & did me the honor to entrust to my discretion, as to whether certain particular expressions should be retained or changed. All that was required, was that I should see the proofs before they were finally committed to the press. – I wrote to you, some weeks since, to this purpose. I have received no answer. –

Some mistake must have arisen, in what manner I cannot well conceive. You must have forgotten or misunderstood my explanations; by some accident you cannot have received my letter. – Do me the favor of writing by return of post; & informing me what intelligence I am to give Lord Byron respecting the commission with which I was entrusted.

LPBS 1: 511

Shelley’s frustration, as part-inspirer of the poem, is clear. Reading between the lines one can tell he knew that Murray had received his letter, and that he was being frozen out by the Tories at Albemarle Street. What would he have felt, in this early stage of their acquaintance, had he known that on August 28th 1816 Byron had actually written to Murray in the following shuffling terms:

Dear Sir – The manuscript (containing the third Canto of Childe Harold – the Castle of Chillon &c. &c.) is consigned to the care of my friend Mr. Shelley – who will deliver this letter along with it. – Mr. Gifford will perhaps be kind enough to read it over; – I know not well to whom to consign the correction of the proofs – nor indeed who would be good natured enough to overlook it in its progress – as I feel very anxious that it should be published with as few errata as possible. – – Perhaps – my friend Mr. Moore (if in town) would do this. – – If not – Mr. S[helley] will take it upon himself, – and in any case – he is authorized to act for me in treating with you &c. &c. on this subject.

BLJ 5: 90

Contrary to what he has assured Shelley, he lays all three possible editors before Murray in a seemingly random way, and appears to be “leaving the choice to him”. But Moore had never been given such a job before, and his name is thrown in thus casually, firstly to make the publisher’s choice seem wider, thereby laying less stress on Shelley, and secondly, in reality, to narrow the choice down – for if the hitherto-unused Shelley is equal with the hitherto-unused Moore, Murray will instinctively turn to Gifford, who had proof-read all of Byron’s work up to this point.

On October 15th 1816 he had further written to Murray: “If I recollect rightly – you told me that Mr. Gifford had kindly undertaken to correct the press (at my request) during my absence – at least I hope so – it will add to my many obligations to that Gentleman” (BLJ 5: 119). It’s clear, in fact, that he’d intended to have Gifford correct the proofs all the time, and that to Shelley he was just being polite.

In 1820, Byron wrote to Hoppner:

I regret that you have such a bad opinion of Shiloh – you used to have a good one. – Surely he has talent – honour – but is crazy against religion and morality. – His tragedy [The Cenci] is sad work – but the subject renders it so. – His Islam had much poetry. – You seem lately to have got some notion against him.

BLJ 6: 174 [letter of September 10th 1820]

“His Islam had much poetry” implies it to be a pity that one cannot devote similar praise to the poem’s plot, characterisation, or allegory. The need to keep on the good side of all one’s friends was as hard then as it is now, particularly when one of them had written something as strange as The Revolt of Islam. On November 24th 1818 he had written to Murray:

I have read his [Southey’s supposed] review of Hunt, where he has attacked Shelley in an oblique and shabby manner. Does he know what that review has done? I will tell you. It has sold an edition of the Revolt of Islam, which, otherwise, nobody would have thought of reading, and few who read can understand – I for one.

BLJ 6: 83

To Shelley he later wrote, referring first to Keats:

You know my opinion of that second-hand school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry, – because it is of no school. I read Cenci – but, besides that I think the subject essentially un-dramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists as models. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to my drama, [Marino Faliero] pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.

I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see.

BLJ 8: 103 [letter of April 26th 1821]

Denying, by clear implication, that Marlowe, Shakespeare, Wycherley, Goldsmith and Sheridan were dramatists, is a hard hole to dig yourself out of. But to cushion the effect of revealing his dislike of The Cenci, Byron is prepared to dig it. What he felt about Prometheus Unbound when he did get it we do not know – this is the only reference to it in all of his letters – though see below for evidence (LPBS 345) that Shelley said he had been “loud in his praise of it”. This praise must have been spoken.

Later he wrote: “Shelley is truth itself – and honour itself – notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion” (BLJ 8: 132 [letter to Kinnaird, June 2nd 1821]). To the Catholic Moore, who disapproved of the connection, he was guarded:

As to poor Shelley, who is another bugbear to you and the world, he is, to my knowledge, the least selfish and the mildest of men – a man who has made more sacrifices of his fortune and feelings for others than any I ever heard of. With his speculative opinions have nothing in common, nor desire to have.

BLJ 9: 119 [letter to Moore of March 4th 1822]

After Shelley had drowned he wrote to Moore, his adverbs betraying his anger with Shelley’s enemies:

You will have heard by this time that Shelley and another gentleman (Captain Williams) were drowned about a month ago (a month yesterday), in a squall off the Gulf of Spezia. There is another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it.

BLJ 9: 190 [letter to Moore, August 8th 1822]

To Murray he wrote, after the same event:

Alas! poor Shelley – how he would have laughed – had he lived, and how we used to laugh now & then – at various things – which are grave in the Suburbs. – You are all mistaken about Shelley – – you do not know – how mild – how tolerant – how good he was in Society – and as perfect a Gentleman as ever crossed a drawing room; – when he liked & where he liked.

BLJ 10: 69 [letter to Murray, December 25th 1822]

A perfect Gentleman was one thing which the atheist, republican, vegetarian and democrat Shelley emphatically was not, despite Horace Smith’s “it was impossible to doubt even for a moment that you were gazing upon a gentleman” (Blunden 145). It was because the Shelleys were atheists that Byron did not want his daughter brought up in their society. But Byron, as usual, writes to disturb, and to afflict the comfortable. Attacking cant had paramountcy over defending strayers from its carnivorous, Tory, Anglican norms.

Finding borrowings, correspondences, and influences between two writers so different is hard, but fascinating. There seems little doubt that each studied the other’s work with absorption; though I think Byron learned more from Shelley than vice versa – and what he found were negative lessons: what to avoid. Shelley, by contrast, was not, I think, able to see Byron’s work very clearly. I have made an attempt to trace some of the cross-currents which can be found. In general we find Byron rejecting Shelley’s “idealism” (if that is not too polite a word for it, in the case, for instance, of Alastor), and recreating Shelley’s naïve universe or universes within the framework of something more this-worldly and, in the case of Adonais and The Vision of Judgement, amusing. Some of Shelley’s writing is “anti-Byron” in that he strives in it to correct Byron’s misanthropy and pessimism by taking a similar subject and reworking it in his own perspective. But finally he despairs of making any impact.

We must not expect to find in print all the conversations on poetry between two men, who were for such long periods in one another’s company. Much must have passed between them of which no written record remains.

It has been suggested[3] that Thomas Taylor’s work on the later neo-Platonist Proclus may form one subtext to Prometheus Unbound, which Shelley did not start until September 1818, but which contains several lines corresponding to, and answering ideas from, Manfred (Robinson 125-134 and nn.) (see below). This is apt, for it seems clear that Manfred had been, in addition to everything else, a creative riposte to Alastor.

Shelley sent Byron Queen Mab in 1816. Claire Claremont may have sent Byron a copy of Alastor, which contained The Daemon of the World, a section from Mab. In either March or April 1816, she wrote to him, as it seems, to answer some questions he’d asked, and to acknowledge an “approbation” he’d given to Shelley’s work so far:

The “Demon of the World” is an extract from the poem entitled “Queen Mab.” The latter was composed at the early age of twenty; although it bears marks of genius, yet the style is so unpoetical & unpolished that I could never admire it. Shelley is now turned three & twenty & interested as I am in all he does it is with the greatest pleasure I receive your approbation. “Alastor” is a most evident proof of improvement; but I think his merit lies in translation – the sonnets from the Greek of Moschus & from Dante are the best. If you think ill of his compositions I hope you will speak – he may improve by your remarks. It was Shelley who sent you “Queen Mab” – I know not wherefore.

Clairmont 1: 29-31

Byron may have spoken, but Shelley did not improve.

No-one as far as I know has ever wondered why Byron chose to put Manfred into dramatic form (it is his first full-scale attempt at drama), or what themes were in his mind, which demanded the sort of objectification which the shifting perspectives of drama could provide, and for which narrative verse was less well equipped.

On June 8 1816 Polidori wrote in his diary, “Up at 9; went to Geneva on horseback, and then to Diodati to see Shelley; back; dined; into the new boat – Shelley’s, – and talked, till the ladies’ brains whizzed with giddiness, about idealism. Back; rain, puffs of wind; mistake” (121). The following day he wrote: “Up by 1: breakfasted. Read Lucian. Dined. Did the same: tea’d. Went to Hentsch: came home. Looked at the moon, and ordered packing-up” (121). Are we to understand from the first entry that it had been a mistake to take the boat out in the rain, or a mistake to talk about idealism? Was it merely the ladies’ brains that whizzed, or did Polidori’s get a bit disorientated too? Did he look at the moon as an idealistically necessary prelude to packing up, or did he pack up in order to escape from the idealist associations of the moon? Like Lucian – to whom Polidori may have turned as a relief from all the idealism – Byron would seem to have been an instinctive foe to transcendentalist thought of most kinds, and to have been interested above all in fleshing out its abstractions with a view to bringing them down to earth: that is to say, to devaluing the very notion of transcendentalism itself. Most of his early epistolary references to Plato, for example, use the philosopher’s name simply as a synonym for sex (BLJ 4: 135) or for the avoidance of sex (BLJ 3: 136) and some of his later poetical references are couched in similar terms – either of ignorance or scepticism: see Don Juan I stanza 116, or XIV stanza 92. His admission at Don Juan IX stanza 76, that “The noblest kind of Love is Love Platonical” is, in the context of the court of Catherine the Great, just another way of expressing doubt about the whole idea.

However, when in a boat with Shelley in June 1816, one would have temporarily to take Platonism – or idealism, at any rate – seriously, for one of the only two major poems of Shelley then in print was the deeply “idealistic” Alastor, published earlier in the year. Byron never refers to it, but it is hard to believe that either Clare or Shelley did not show him it, that he did not read it, and that it was not on his mind during the writing of Manfred. Drama and idealism make poor bedfellows, for drama is unhappy with the abstract. When, at I.ii.27-36, Manfred sees an eagle passing, he speaks thus to it:

 [...] I have ceased

To justify my deeds unto myself –

The last infirmity of evil. [an Eagle passes.

 Aye,

Thou winged and cloud-cleaving minister,

Whose happy flight is highest into heaven,

Well may’st thou swoop so near me – I should be

Thy prey, and gorge thine Eaglets; thou art gone

Where the eye cannot follow thee; but thine

Yet pierces downward, onward, or above

With a pervading vision [...]

The eagle might at first glance appear open to an idealist interpretation, an emblem of the clear-sighted perfection beyond; and it is natural to compare the passage with the Poet’s address to the swan (seen “upon the lone Chorasmian shore”) at Alastor, 280-91:

 “Thou hast a home,

Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home,

Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck

With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes

Bright in the lustre of her own fond joy.

And what am I that I should linger here,

With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,

Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned

To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers

In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven

That echoes not my thoughts?” A gloomy smile

Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.

lines 280-91; PoS 1: 474-5

The contrast, however, is striking. Manfred feels himself altogether inferior to the eagle. In the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus (lines 1020-5) the protagonist is warned by Hermes that he will become the prey of eagles, and Manfred would welcome the same fate; where Shelley’s Poet sees the swan as a reminder of his own wasted genius, Manfred sees the eagle as a reminder of his own insignificance and mortality. Byron’s bird is ornithologically (and thus dramatically) convincing, in that it is only interested in food for its young; the “lustre” in the eyes of Shelley’s bird is anthropomorphic: it is not a bird, but a poetic convenience. Byron would have felt birds to have an independent being which poetry should honour. He had in his time shot an eagle and decapitated a goose, and experienced guilt (at least over the first).

When in II.i.90-2 the Chamois Hunter sees Manfred on the mountain, about to kill himself, the first thought that occurs to him (he being a realistically-dramatised Alpine inhabitant) is practical: “I must approach him cautiously; if near,/ A sudden step will startle him, and he/ Seems tottering already.” Compare Alastor, lines 257-62:

 The mountaineer,

Encountering on some dizzy precipice

That spectral form, deemed that the Spirit of wind

With lightning eyes, and eager breath, and feet

Disturbing not the drifted snow, had paused

In its career [...]

PoS 1: 473-4

Byron’s “mountaineer” is guilty of no such misapprehension, and would not think in terms of “the Spirit of wind” anyway.

As with birds and mountaineers, so with geography. There are editors who would compute the precise direction of Shelley’s Poet’s wanderings: “The Poet flees from Kashmir to the northwest into what is now Afghanistan and then into the central Asian areas that in classical times (whose geographical terms Shelley employs) were Persian provinces; some of these areas are now parts of the U.S.S.R.” (RaP 76n.)

Even Shelley might have been surprised by such flattery of his apparent intention: but one can imagine Byron wondering how the Poet travelled, how he kept warm at nights, how many of the local “savage men” really looked upon and heard his “sweet voice and eyes” with sufficient favour to feed him (lines 81-2). Manfred moves around a relatively small area of Europe which Byron had recently got to know well. Taking his cue, perhaps, from Goethe, who carefully places his drunken orgy in the historical Auerbach’s Cellar in Leipzig (where he had studied) and his Walpurgisnacht on the Harz, Byron not only names his mountains precisely, but attempts, via notes, to convince us that, for example, the rainbow, out of which Manfred conjures the Witch of the Alps at the start of II.ii., was one he had seen. It is a rhetorical device, for although we know Byron went and inspected the rainbow (BLJ 5: 101). we do not know that he conjured a witch from out of it; but he imposes a convincing local habitation, and thus a convincing modesty, on his airy nothings, which Shelley would eschew.

The figure of Astarte shows Byron learning most clearly from the example of Alastor. Shelley’s Poet has two women, one “real”, in the adoring Arab maiden at 129-39, the other “ideal”, in that of the Veiled Maiden of whom the Poet dreams at 151-91. Their close juxtaposition has obvious implications for Shelley’s theme of wilful and doomed isolation, for the Poet ignores the one, and the other exists only in his dreams – a fact which ultimately destroys his happiness and his life. In creating Astarte, once living, but now dead, and, though her spirit may still be approached, almost inaccessibly cryptic, Byron economically combines the reality of the Arab maiden with the dream-quality of the Veiled Maiden – giving the whole creation a characteristically Byronic aura of guilt and horror which would be equally out of place in Alastor. Byron’s piece being dramatic, we are also invited empathetically to imagine Manfred in Astarte’s critical perspective, and their entire relationship, fleetingly, via a third party’s perspective, in the interrupted words of Manuel at III.iii. 43-7: whereas Shelley’s depiction of the two maidens in Alastor remains open to the criticism that neither is really seen in much of a perspective at all, certainly not one critical of the Poet. This may be part of Shelley’s intention; but Byron would have seen in it a lesson about what to avoid.

Shelley’s Poet, we find from lines 121-8, possesses an enviable capacity to learn via simple, ecstatic contemplation:

He lingered, poring on memorials

Of the world’s youth, through the long burning day

Gazed on those speechless shapes, nor, when the moon

Filled the mysterious halls with floating shades

Suspended he that task, but ever gazed

And gazed, till meaning on his vacant mind

Flashed like strong inspiration, and he saw

The thrilling secrets of the birth of time.

lines 121-8; PoS 1: 469

Really? what were they? we may imagine Byron asking eagerly, but with no hope of an answer, for Shelley does not say. The secrets do his protagonist no good, at any rate, for he continues his flight to greater and greater loneliness and death despite knowing them. Manfred has to work much harder to obtain his secrets:

 [...] then I dived,

In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death,

Searching its cause in its effect; and drew

From withered bones, and skulls, and heaped up dust,

Conclusions most forbidden. Then I passed

The nights of years in sciences untaught,

Save in the old time; and with time and toil,

And weary vigils, and unbroken fasts,

And terrible ordeal, and such penance

As in itself has power upon the air,

And spirits that do compass air and earth,

Space, and the peopled infinite, I made

Mine eyes familiar with Eternity,

Such as before me did the Magi, and

He who from out their fountain dwellings raised

Eros and Anteros at Gadara,

As I do thee; – and with my knowledge grew

The thirst of knowledge, and the power and joy

Of this most bright intelligence, until ...[4]

II.ii.79-97, including a new line 86

Some self-denial, hard work and suffering is involved in the acquisition of most knowledge, and Manfred clearly had his fair share of it, where Shelley’s Poet seems to have been vouchsafed infinite and incommunicable wisdom after a few days’ gazing. It is true that Manfred is no less dead by the end of his poem than the Poet is by the end of his: but he at least has something to show for his life of isolation and guilt (some self-knowledge, real power over spirits, a human beloved who has, no matter what the consequences, returned his love, and a reputation locally which causes those who know him to grieve for him) where Shelley’s Poet has nothing. He has not even written any poetry (though one feels, in saying this, that one may have missed the point).

Shelley initially felt very confident about Alastor; on March 7th 1816 he wrote to Southey, presenting him with a copy:

I cannot refrain from presenting you with a little poem, the product of a few serene hours of the last beautiful autumn [...] regarding you with admiration as a poet, and with respect as a man, I send you, as an intimation of those sentiments, my first serious attempt to interest the best feelings of the human heart [...]

LPBS 2: 461-2

But by December 8th 1818 he was writing to Leigh Hunt:

[...] I do not say that I am unjustly neglected, the oblivion which overtook my little attempt of Alastor I am ready to acknowledge was sufficiently merited in itself; but then it was not accorded in the correct proportion considering the success of the most contemptible drivellings. I am undec[e]ived in the belief that I have powers deeply to interest, or substantially to improve, mankind.

LPBS 1: 517

The cause of his despondency may have lain partly in the failure of Alastor to stir any impulse of praise in either Byron or Southey, partly in the creative use – and the implicitly critical use – to which Byron had put Alastor in Manfred. In his three references to Byron’s play (LPBS 1: 546-7, 557; 2: 283; letters to Byron of July 9th and September 24th 1817, and April 16th 1821) he makes no allusion to any borrowing or critique (contrast Goethe’s instantaneous assumption of plagiarism from Faust) but it is hard to imagine him being blind to it. When, in 1821, reading Don Juan III Stanza 98 (see LPBS 2: 332, 357-8), he found, “He wishes for “a boat” to sail the deeps –/ Of Ocean? No, of Air, and then he makes/ Another outcry for “a little boat”,/ And drivels Seas to set it well afloat. –” and (just conceivably) remembered the boat in which he, Byron, Polidori and the ladies had discussed idealism until their heads whizzed, might he not have felt a slight twinge as he reflected, in addition, that the second phrase which Byron advertises in inverted commas was not merely from Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, but that it occurred twice (lines 344 and 363) in Alastor?[5]

There have been attempts to politicise Alastor. Nigel Leask writes that it “could be read as an unmasking of Britain’s desire for its Indian Other” (123); Michael Rossington writes of it in terms of “Shelley’s response to wider contemporary arguments about the search for a ‘cradle of civilization’” (20). If either is true, neither the Indian Other nor the ‘cradle of civilization’ has anything to fear.

The different ways in which Byron listened to and was influenced by whoever was with him at the time has been underestimated. He was an excellent listener, and an empathetic chameleon, and it affected his work in a way which would have amazed those who saw him as proud, independent and original. Writing in 1823, with Childe Harold well behind him, he defines the quality, which he calls “mobility,” thus:

In French, Mobilité. I am not sure that mobility is English — but it is expressive of a quality which rather belongs to other climates — though it is sometimes seen to a great extent in our own. It may be defined as an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions, at the same time without losing the past, and is — though sometimes apparently useful to the possessor — a most painful and unhappy attribute. — — —

DJ XVI.97.4, Byron’s note

His excessive susceptibility of the immediate impression of Shelley during the composition of Childe Harold III has been well-documented, not least by himself, speaking to Medwin:

“You are accused of owing a great deal to Wordsworth. Certainly there are some stanzas in the Third Canto of ‘Childe Harold’ that smell strongly of the Lakes: for instance —

 I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me; – and to me

High mountains are a feeling!”

“Very possibly,” replied he. “Shelley, when I was in Switzerland, used to dose me with Wordsworth even to nausea; and I do remember then reading some things of his with pleasure. He had once a feeling for Nature, which he carried almost to a deification of it: – that’s why Shelley liked his poetry.”

Medwin 194

What has not been documented is his excessive susceptibility of the immediate impression of John Cam Hobhouse during the composition of Childe Harold I, II, and IV. The unspiritual Hobhouse (“Hobhouse [...] is a Cynic after my own heart”; BLJ 3: 47 [letter to Lady Melbourne, May 7 1813]) disliked Childe Harold III:

“Mem: Byron has given me before another Canto of Childe Harold to read. It is very fine in parts, but I doubt whether I like it so much as his first Cantos – there is an air of mystery and metaphysics about it.”

It comes as no surprise to find that Hobhouse refers to Shelley as infrequently as possible in his diary. On the date (August 30th 1816) when we know that Byron, he, and Scrope Davies, found Shelley’s “Atheist” signature in the Alpine hotel visitors’ book, he does not mention it. On arriving at Diodati on Tuesday August 27th 1816, all he writes is this: “Walked with S.B.Davies to Geneva – ugly town. Bazaars with high wooden domes. Went to Hentsch, to the post office. Found letter from my mother. Wrote one to her – came home – dined – went on water – wet and sick – Mr. Shelley.” On September 15th 1822, visiting Byron in Pisa, all he records is this:

“Leigh Hunt was brought out here by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mr Shelley was lately drowned in going from Leghorn to La Spezzia, and Lord Byron considered Leigh Hunt as a legacy left to him.”

We may perhaps deduce something of Shelley’s attitude to Hobhouse from the following, which is part of a letter from Claire Claremont to Byron of January 12th 1818:

Alone I study Plutarch’s lives wherein I find nothing but excitements to virtue & abstinence: with Mary & Shelley the scene changes but from the contemplation of the virtues of the dead to those of the living. I have no Hobhouse by my side to dispirit me with an easy & impudent declaration of “the villany of all mankind” which I can construe into nothing but an attempt to cover his conscious unworthiness.

Clairmont 1: 109-11

She finds that from the innocent Mary and Shelley one imbibed an optimistic idea of mankind: from the depraved and Mephistophelean Hobhouse, the reverse. Along with Annabella and Augusta, Claire seems to have found Byron’s best friend detestable. Shelley dismissed John Cam economically. A P.S. to a letter to Byron goes, “Make my remembrances to Hobhouse – as also to Mr. Davies. I hope that the former has destroyed whatever scruples you have felt, in dismissing Polidori. The anecdote which he recounted to me the evening before I left Geneva made my blood run cold.” (LPBS 1: 504 [letter to Byron of September 8th 1816]). “Of Hobhouse,” he writes to Peacock on January 23rd-24th 1819, “I have a very slight opinion” (LPBS 2: 75). There are few other references to Hobhouse in his letters.

Hobhouse was present throughout the composition of the first two cantos of Childe Harold; he arrived in Venice from Rome in time to be one of the first to read the rough version of the fourth: he was present throughout that canto’s revision, and became intimate enough with it to try his hand at a four-stanza imitation, and to write an elaborate commentary on it – Historical Illustrations. The idea that for one canto he had been displaced by as weird a person as Shelley must have rankled.[6]

Love and all that went with it was a subject with which Hobhouse was unhappy. On December 12th 1816 Byron wrote to him, referring to Mariana Segati, and perhaps gloating: “My own amours go on very tranquilly – she plagues me less than any woman I ever met with – and I am indebted to her for the pleasantest month I can reckon this many a day. – I know you hate that sort of thing – so I will say no more about love & the like [...]” (BLJ 5: 143). Hobhouse experienced the occasional crush, but found the experience humiliating, for few women found him attractive; and he could normally think himself out of a passion within twenty-four hours. All his sexual experience was with prostitutes. Scarcely a bold lover, he may have had an affair with his sisters’ governess, late in 1815; but it was furtive. “Mlle Butler sits up with me till one and I make no use of this opportunity, no thanks to my virtue neither,” he writes in shame. “I’m afraid of repulse first, and discovery afterwards.” Love plays little part in the three cantos of Childe Harold written with him around. Shelley, contrariwise, knew love to be the mainspring of the universe:

Love is like understanding that grows bright,

Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,

Imagination! which from earth and sky,

And from the depths of human phantasy,

As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills

The Universe with glorious beams, and kills

Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow

Of its reverberated lightning.

Epipsychidion lines 162-9; RaP 378

The context here, in Epipsychidion, makes it clear, indeed, that he thought the more love there was, the better. The idea that love often encourages Error, and has tragic consequences, never appears to have occurred to him. If he had read The Giaour, or Parisina, he never betrayed having done so.

The opening of Childe Harold III, expressing Byron’s love for his daughter Ada, was written, if he is to be believed, on the cross-Channel packet, before he met Shelley. The Castled Crag of Drachenfels, expressing his love for Augusta, was written, according to the manuscript, on the spot on May 11th – also before he met Shelley. But we can be sure that the concluding stanzas, which revert to the subject of Ada, were written with Shelley in the vicinity. Here is part of stanza 115, and all of 116:

 [...] My voice shall with thy future visions blend,

 And reach into thy heart, – when mine is cold, –

A token and a tone, even from thy father’s mould.

 To aid thy Mind’s development, – to watch

 Thy dawn of little joys – to sit and see

 Almost thy very Growth – to view thee catch

 Knowledge of objects – wonders yet to thee!

 To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,

 And print on thy soft cheek a parent’s kiss, –

 This, it should seem, was not reserved for me;

 Yet this was in my Nature – as it is,

I know not what is there, yet something like to this.

lines 1073-1084

Whether Byron really would have been an affectionate father, or whether he’s here indulging a posture, knowing that his bluff is unlikely ever to be called, is an issue. I am impressed by the knowledge that when his other daughter, Allegra, died, he had not visited her for fourteen months. The irony of Byron writing about love, Byron who had recently rejected, with some brutality, the love of a good woman (one with a considerable sexual appetite, if he is to be believed), and had left his parental responsibility well behind, has been insufficiently noted.

On June 27th 1816, he writes to Murray: “I have traversed all Rousseau’s ground – with the Heloise before me – & am struck to a degree with the force & accuracy of his descriptions – & the beauty of their reality: – Meillerie – Clarens & Vevey – & the Chateau de Chillon are places of which I shall say little – because all I could say must fall short of the impressions they stamp” (BLJ 5: 82). Rousseau’s epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), with its unprecedented depiction of love, had a huge impact on its readers, who included Byron and, especially, Shelley. It chimed in more naturally with Shelley’s temperament than it did with Byron’s. When they toured Lake Geneva (without their womenfolk), and came at its eastern end to the scenes described by Rousseau, the two poets seem to have had a copy of the novel open all the time, and to have been both impressed by the fidelity of Rousseau’s descriptions, and still more overwhelmed than they had previously been by the feelings of love and despair it depicted:

 His love was Passion’s Essence – as a tree

 On fire by lightning, with ethereal flame

 Kindled he was, and blasted; for to be

 Thus, and enamoured, were in him the same.

 But his was not the love of living dame,

 Nor of the dead who rise upon our dreams,

 But of ideal Beauty, which became

 In him existence, and o’erflowing teems

Along his burning page – distempered though it seems.

 This breathed itself to life in Julie; this

 Invested her with all that’s wild and sweet;

 This hallowed, too, the memorable kiss

 Which every morn his fevered lip would greet

 From hers, who but with friendship his would meet;

 But to that gentle touch through brain and breast

 Flashed the thrilled Spirit’s love-devouring heat;

 In that absorbing sigh perchance more blest

Than vulgar Minds may be with all they seek possest.

CHP III.78-9.734-751

“[...] distempered though it seems” is a critical glance sideways, and the slur on “vulgar minds” satiated is his (and Shelley’s) self-reassurance: both they and Rousseau belong to an exclusive club. He outgrew the influence of Shelley’s reading of Rousseau’s novel, and also outgrew – at some speed – the influence of Shelley’s reading of Wordsworth. He normally despised Wordsworth as a time-serving feudalistic sycophant and a poet of tedium and triviality. But Shelley’s persuasive personality, or his own “openness to impressions” – or both – converted him briefly to the opposite viewpoint. The influence on him of Shelley’s Wordsworth did not last. On September 28th 1816, Shelley having gone and Hobhouse having returned, Byron wrote the following in his Alpine Journal:

I was disposed to be pleased – I am a lover of Nature – and an Admirer of Beauty – I can bear fatigue – & welcome privation – and have seen some of the noblest views in the world. – But in all this – the recollections of bitterness – & more especially of recent & more home desolation – which must accompany me through life – have preyed upon me here – and neither the music of the Shepherd – the crashing of the Avalanche – nor the torrent – the mountain – the Glacier – the Forest – nor the Cloud – have for one moment – lightened the weight upon my heart – nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty & the power and the Glory – around – above – & beneath me. – I am past reproaches – and there is a time for all things – I am past the wish of vengeance – and I know of none like for what I have suffered – but the hour will come – when what I feel must be felt – & the – – but enough.

BLJ 5: 104-5

His reading of Wordsworth is, in Childe Harold III, perverse in any case. Wordsworth would have Nature as an Other, a thing mightier than man, a teacher of humility, of patience and submission. Here are the famous lines from Tintern Abbey:

 And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

lines 94-103

But here is Byron:

 Sky – Mountains – River – Winds – Lake – Lightnings! Ye

 With night, and clouds, and thunder, and a Soul

 To make these felt and feeling, well may be

 Things that have made me watchful; the far roll

 Of your departing voices is the knoll

 Of what in me is sleepless – if I rest;

 But where of ye, oh tempests – is the goal?

 Are ye like those within the human breast?

Or do ye find, at length, like Eagles, some high Nest?

CHP III.96.896-904

For Byron, Nature is another self – or rather, a reflection of his own ego, another way of rendering himself, not patient and philosophical, but more volcanic, alienated, and dramatic in the eyes of the world. How much of this misinterpretation is indeed a consequence of Shelley’s “dosing,” we shall never know. Wordsworth was dismissive, but was not interested enough in Byron to make a detailed parallel:

I have not, nor ever had a single poem of Lord Byron’s by me, except the Lara, given me by Mr Rogers, & therefore could not quote any thing illustrative of his poetic obligations to me: as far as I am acquainted with his works, they are <much> {the} most apparent in the 3^d Canto of Childe Harold; not so much in particular expressions, tho’ there is no want of these, as in the tone (assumed rather than natural) of enthusiastic admiration of Nature, & a sensibility to her influences. Of my writings you need not read more than the blank verse poem on the river Wye[7] to be convinced of this.[8]

If Manfred mocks Alastor, Prometheus Unbound reproaches Manfred. In The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight, Charles Robinson writes:

[...] the “forms” that “modified” Prometheus Unbound were Byron’s Prometheus and Manfred. But true to his distinction between “spirit” and “form” and to his previous ironic uses of Byron’s poetry, Shelley borrowed from Byron’s Prometheus poems only to subvert their metaphysics and simultaneously assert the superiority of his own judgments about man’s internal nature.

114

Later he quotes Earl Wasserman: “In many ways, Prometheus Unbound is a reply to Manfred.” He adds, however, that Wasserman does not pursue the argument (125).

Two letters of Shelley to Ollier, written in July and August 1817, perhaps indicate a sequel to Byron’s indebtedness to Thomas Taylor’s notes to Pausanias, which had led in part to the construction of the demonology in Manfred:[9]

Be so good as to send me “Tasso’s Lament” a Poem just published; & Taylors Translation of Pausanias. You will oblige me by sending them without delay, as I have immediate need for them.

LPBS 2: 548 [letter of July 24^th 1817]

Do you know is Taylors Pausanias to be procured & at what price.

LPBS 2: 549 [P.S. to a letter of August 3^rd 1817]

Prometheus Unbound and Manfred have similar spirit-hierarchies, both deriving from Taylor’s notes to his translation of Pausanias:

The following Platonic dogma, which belongs to the greatest arcana of ancient Wisdom, solves all that appears to be so absurd and ridiculous to the atheistical and superficial in such-like historical relations as the present. Every deity beginning from on high, produces his own proper series to the last of things; and this series comprehends in itself many essences differing from each other. Thus, for instance, the Sun produces Angelical, Daemoniacal, Heroical, Nymphical, Panical, and such-like powers, each of which subsists according to a solar characteristic: and the same reasoning must be applied to every other divinity. All these powers are the perpetual attendants of the Gods, but they have not all of them an essence wholly superior to man. For after essential Heroes an order of souls follows, who proximately govern the affairs of men, and are daemoniacal κατα σχεσιν, according to habitude or alliance, but not essentially. Of this kind are the Nymphs that sympathize with waters, Pans with the feet of goats, and the like: and they differ from those powers that are essentially of a daemoniacal characteristic, in this, that they assume a variety of shapes (each of the others immutably preserving one form), are subject to various passions, and are the causes of all-various deception to mankind.

2: 235

On the highest level of this Pantheon is the Demiurgus, Zeus, the Creator, “the over-ruling Infinite – the Maker”, as Manfred calls him at II.iv.47: he is Intellect, above earthly things, and incorporeal (one of the “Powers deeper still beyond” to which Manfred refers at II.iv.76). He may be confused with the Sun, to whom Manfred addresses his speech in III.ii. In Prometheus “the overruling Infinite” is Demogorgon.

Next, in Byron’s play, come a trinity of mixed supra-mundane and mundane deities – “Angelical [...] Powers” – represented by Arimanes, Nemesis and the three Destinies. Byron does not want to be thought of as too whole-hearted a neo-Platonist, so, to confuse us, he gives them names and titles from both Zoroastrian dualism and classical European myth. They are Soul, but may interfere materially in earthly matters – see their speeches in Manfred II.iii. Shelley’s equivalent is Jupiter, who punishes Prometheus. No-one, divine or hellish, punishes Manfred: he has made himself the equal of all gods and spirits, and punishes himself. Astarte and Manfred may be of the race of “essential Heroes” to whom Taylor refers, overlapping with demons in the neo-Platonic hierarchy: Shelley’s most important “essential heroes” are Prometheus and Asia – a much happier pair, by the end of the piece, than Manfred and Astarte.

Lastly is a hierarchy of demons – “Nymphical, Panical, and such-like powers”: the Seven Spirits in I.i., the Voices in the Incantation (perhaps those of the Seven) and the Witch of the Alps in I.ii. Given that Manfred converses with these as their equal, if not master, he may be said to be one of them: “[...] they have not all of them an essence wholly superior to man”. So may Astarte, who has to answer the call of Nemesis at II.iv.84-97, although Nemesis cannot force her to speak. Shelley also has (inter alia) Mercury, Ione and Panthea, Ocean, and Apollo, plus the Five ministering Spirits, the Three Voices, the Echoes, the Fauns, and the Three Furies. We listen in vain for distinct tones of voice amongst this profusion.

Shelley adds Earth, mother to Prometheus and to Zoroaster – Manfred refers to no parents, and never refers to Zoroaster, though Zoroastriansim is as important to his system as it is to Shelley’s, for the relationship between Jupiter and Prometheus is identical to that between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, gods of Light and Dark in the Persian religion:

MERCURY: Oh, that we might be spared – I to inflict,

 And thou to suffer! Once more answer me:

 Thou knowest not the period of Jove’s power?

PROMETHEUS: I know but this, that it must come.

MERCURY: Alas,

 Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?

PROMETHEUS: They last while Jove must reign: nor more, nor less

 Do I desire or fear.

I.i.410-16; PoS 2: 501-2

In the same way, Ahura Mazda, the Persian light-bringer, must give way to Ahriman, lover of darkness, for an apparent aeon, but will finally replace him.[10]

The landscape of Prometheus Unbound is that of a poetical Shangri-La. Here is Asia describing the approach to Demogorgon’s cave in II.iii.:

Look Sister – ere the vapor dim thy brain:

Beneath is a wide plain of billowy mist,

As a lake, paving in the morning sky,

With azure waves which burst in silver light,

Some Indian vale ... Behold it, rolling on

Under the curdling winds, and islanding

The peak whereon we stand – midway, around

Encinctured by the dark and blooming forests,

Dim twilight-lawns, and stream-illuminèd caves,

And wind-enchanted shapes of wandering mist;

And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains

From icy spires of sunlike radiance fling

The dawn, as lifted Ocean’s dazzling spray,

From some Atlantic islet scattered up,

Spangles the wind with lamp-like water-drops.

lines 18-32

For “Indian,” read “imaginary, non-geographical.” Here is Manfred in the Alps in I.ii.:

Manfred: Hark! the note,

 [The Shepherd’s pipe in the distance is heard.

The natural music of the mountain reed –

For here the patriarchal days are not

A pastoral fable – pipes in the liberal air,

Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd;

My Soul would drink those echoes. Oh, that I were

The viewless Spirit of a lovely sound,

A living voice, a breathing harmony,

A bodiless enjoyment, born and dying

With the blest tone which made me!

 [Enter from below a Chamois Hunter.

Chamois Hunter: Even so –

This way the Chamois leapt – her nimble feet

Have baffled me – my gains today will scarce

Repay my breakneck travail.

lines 47-59

Shelley is not interested in pipes or hunters, still less in Byron’s sauntering herds (which derive from Gray’s “lowing herd”). Sauntering herds drop cow-pats, for which there might just be space in Manfred, were one dramatically necessary. To ask Shelley to be more mundane seems cruel. His characters really are “living voices” and “breathing harmonies” – it’s as if he’s taken Manfred’s dream of being a “viewless spirit” (which Manfred, for all his encounters with the supernatural and for all his thoughts about the patriarchal days, knows to be a dream), and, ignoring the protagonist’s self-awareness, has granted his wish, and created the world about which Manfred fantasises – this not with a view to satire, but to a confirmation of the dream’s legitimacy; with a view to indulging it. Byron, with the ultra-normal (perhaps slightly sub-normal) Hobhouse for company, really had seen the landscape about which he writes. No-one has ever seen the one about which Shelley writes: although that may of course be the point.

Manfred could have been a Prometheus (he is persecuted by no-one, having done mankind no favours, and having injured only himself and Astarte). He has the Promethean wisdom, he has the Promethean resource – but lacks the Promethean benevolence. He resembles Byron’s own Prometheus in some ways:

What was thy pity’s recompense?

A silent suffering, and intense;

The rock, the vulture, and the chain,

All that the proud can feel of pain,

The agony they do not show,

The suffocating sense of woe,

 Which speaks but in its loneliness,

And then is jealous lest the sky

Should have a listener, nor will sigh

Until its voice is echoless.

lines 5-14

Manfred is proud, like this: like this, he does not care to share his suffering with others, though circumstances sometimes force him to, as with the Chamois Hunter, and as with the devils when he pleads with Astarte. But he is not refused “the gift to die” (Prometheus line 22) nor can it be said of him that “Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,/ To render with thy precepts less/ The sum of human wretchedness,/ And strengthen Man with his own mind [...] (lines 35-38).

Instead, he defines himself by what he does not share with his kind, by an unwillingness to admit that he is one of them. His arrogance, Byron being an instinctive dramatist and an ironical manipulator of perspectives, can rebound against him comically:

Manfred: Patience, and Patience! Hence! that word was made

 For brutes of burthen – not for birds of prey;

 Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine –

 I am not of thine order.

Chamois Hunter: Thanks to heaven!

 I would not be of thine, for the free fame

 Of William Tell [...]

II.1.35-40

... though Manfred is unswayed by such rustic ironies (rustic, too, in the most unWordsworthian tone (McGann 25): imagine the Leech Gatherer talking back like this). He tells the Witch of the Alps:

 From my youth upwards,

My Spirit walked not with the souls of men,

Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes.

The thirst of their Ambition was not mine –

The aim of their existence was not mine –

My joys – my griefs – my passions and my powers

Made me a stranger, though I wore the form

I had no sympathy with breathing flesh [...]

lines 50-57

Shelley’s Prometheus, on the other hand, has plenty of sympathy with breathing flesh; and is uninhibited about sharing his agony with the universe:

 [...] these are mine empire.

More glorious far than that which thou surveyest

From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!

Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame

Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here

Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,

Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,

Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life –

Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever!

I.i.15-23; PoS 2: 478

No stoic he. But the play – if play it is – will not allow us any ironical perspective on him (compare O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman, where one of the two protagonists iterates Prometheus’ last line here so often that we get sick of it). Prometheus has no Chamois Hunter to contextualise him in the midst of ordinary humanity, no Witch or Astarte to whom he can unburden an “awful” vision of himself (Jupiter describes Prometheus as “an awful spirit” at III.i.23; see McGann 29-33) and no Abbot to give us an opposing viewpoint on his plight. All his hearers and interlocutors are sympathetic towards him. This is part of Shelley’s scheme, for Prometheus, unlike Manfred, is mankind’s benefactor: however, we have to admit that celebrating what is, in the consensus of most of your characters, goodness, is harder than portraying bad deeds and self-defeat. Especially if you disdain plot, and especially, as with Shelley, you have a limited perspective on what you are writing:

The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.

PoS 2: 472-3

Ambition and a desire for personal aggrandizement are, in Manfred’s idiom, what Manfred is guilty of. But if Milton is guilty of the “most pernicious casuistry” in depicting Satan, how much more pernicious is Shakespeare’s casuistry in depicting Macbeth – or the infinitely controversial Hamlet? When Byron rejects Shakespearean multi-dimensionality, as in his apology for not liking The Cenci, it may in part be sincere, in part envious, in part tactical; when Shelley does so, as he does by implication here, he really means it. It is an innocent (perhaps) but fatal error; for if Prometheus were permitted a few modest faults, more people might read the poem. But ...

 [...] I hate no more

As then, ere misery made me wise. The Curse

Once breathed on thee I would recall.

I.i.57-9; PoS 2: 481

I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

I.i.305; PoS 2: 465

Where the protagonist has no moral faults, and is fastened to a rock, there can not be much drama. But I do not think Shelley was interested in drama when he wrote Prometheus Unbound. He thought he had all his conceptual problems solved, and thus had no interest in dramatic conflicts.

Commentators have a wonderful way of describing the style of Prometheus accurately and with apparent approbation, while pointing in fact to its greatest weaknesses:

It is, then, the ability of the shadow world to resist our desire for unequivocal meaning which makes it an apt emblem of the imaginative openness of mind that Shelley wishes to encourage.

O’Neill 95

Promethean voice is always reclaiming speech from a language of reference, where words are assumed to have stronger relations to the objects and thoughts they represent than to one another.

Brisman 51-86

Such passages reinforce one’s deepest suspicion about much of Shelley’s poetry: that for a lot of the time it is not about anything at all. It was Matthew Arnold who had had the temerity to write that “[...] all the personal charm of Shelley cannot hinder us from at last discovering in his poetry the incurable want, in general, of a sound subject-matter” (Arnold 98).

Byron – of whom no-one could say that he lacked subject-matter – mistrusted the imagination as a way of creating one: “But I hate things all fiction & therefore the Merchant & Othello have no great associations for me – but Pierre has – there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric – and pure invention is but the talent of a liar [...]” (BLJ 5: 203 [letter to Murray, April 2 1817]). This overstatement, with its characteristically desperate putting-down of Shakespeare, was written in April 1817, before he’d read any major works by Shelley other than Alastor: how much more strongly would he have put it having read Prometheus Unbound? His reliance, during the writing of Don Juan, of prose sources such as Dalyell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters, “Tully’s Tripoli”, Castelnau’s Histoire de la Nouvelle Russie, and Ude’s cookbook, may be a reaction against the distance between Shelley’s works of “pure invention” and any reliable repositories of reality such as the books listed.

Byron underpins Manfred with massive Shakespearean subtexts, which, by his own theory, should have had no “great associations” for him. But Manfred is at once Macbeth, Prospero, and Coriolanus.[11] Thereby Byron gives his protagonist humanity even in his inhumanity. Shelley has no such subtexts (now and then Prometheus Unbound echoes A Midsummer Night’s Dream), but humour and humanity are both absent from it. It’s not a dramatic event – not a performance text. The fact that he cast it in dramatic form seems evidence that he was trying to correct what he considered the unacceptable pessimism of Manfred; but in avoiding human interest (“quotidian human emergencies” [McGann 59]) and concentrating on spirit and idea, he appears not to understand the arena in which he’s combating. Again we ask, was Shelley able to read Byron? Worse, was he able to read Milton, or Shakespeare?

If part of his intention was to give Byron an alternative view of Prometheus, and thus perhaps of a poet’s relationship to his kind, Shelley demonstrates, in Prometheus Unbound, an inability to work in the same dimensions as his friend and adversary – an inability – an unwillingness – to work in the dimensions in which most of what readers he had (and has), lived and live.

I wonder if this criticism would bother him. In A Defence of Poetry he writes: “The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted” (RaP 485). Or, more plainly, in a letter to John Gisborne: “As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles, – you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as expect any thing human or earthly from me” (LPBS 2: 363 [letter of October 12^th 1821]). The specific poem to which he refers here is Epipsychidion; but the statement, parodying his critics (who include many of his friends), is a general one.

With Prometheus Unbound Shelley published To a Skylark. One can imagine Byron becoming impatient with it at once: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!/ Bird thou never wert –” (lines 1-2). For Byron, eagles were eagles and geese were geese. To tell a skylark that it never was a bird was to offend his most elementary standard of commonsense. He never mentions the poem.

On May 6th 1820 Shelley wrote to Byron:

I have read your “Don Juan” in print, and I observe that the murrain has killed some of the finest of the flock, i.e., that your bookseller has omitted certain passages. The personal ones, however, though I thought them wonderfully strong, I do not regret. What a strange and terrible storm is that at sea, and the two fathers, how true, yet how strong a contrast! Dante hardly exceeds it. With what flashes of divine beauty have you not illuminated the familiarity of your subject towards the end! The love letter, and the account of its being written, is altogether a masterpiece of portraiture; of human nature laid with the eternal colours of the feelings of humanity. Where did you learn all these secrets? I should like to go to school there. I cannot say I equally approve of the service to which this letter was appropriated; or that I altogether think the bitter mockery of our common nature, of which this is one of the expressions, quite worthy of your genius. The power and the beauty and the wit, indeed, redeem all this – chiefly because they belie and refute it. Perhaps it is foolish to wish that there had been nothing to redeem.

LPBS 2: 198

He admires the poem; but wishes that there was less humour in it. Its “bitter mockery of our common nature” reminds him too much of Childe Harold IV, that least humorous of all poems. For Byron, humour was of the essence (he wrote Beppo before Childe Harold IV was finished, and with no help from Hobhouse), and he was well able to laugh at himself. There are even jokes in Manfred – though not, I think, where Professor McGann finds them. I quote the Chamois Hunter, on William Tell, above. Here is Manfred, in III.iv., warning the Abbot to go away:

Manfred: 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.

lines 69-73

The panic of both men, the Abbot’s from supernatural dread and Manfred’s from sudden puzzlement at the idea of one spirit, at last, not summoned by him, is economically done. But we have to agree with Shelley that some of the jokes in Don Juan II are a bit much: