The Spirits. Tear him in pieces! — First Des. Crush the worm! Hence! Avaunt!-he's mine. Prince of the Powers invisible ! This man Is of no common order, as his port And presence here denote; his sufferings Our own; his knowledge and his powers and will, Which clogs the ethereal essence, have been such Of earth and heaven, from which no power, nor being, Nor breath from the worm upwards is exempt, A soul like his or power upon his soul. Let him answer that. Man. Ye know what I have known; and without power I could not be amongst ye: but there are Nem. What would'st thou ? Man. Hear me, hear me Astarte my beloved! speak to me: I have so much endured-so much endure- To bind me in existence- in a life I know not what I ask, nor what I seek: And I would hear yet once before I perish And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Which answer'd me- many things answer'd me— Man. One word for mercy! Say, thou lovest me. Phan. Manfred! [The Spirit of ASTARTE disappears. 1 Nem. She's gone, and will not be recall'd; Her words will be fulfill'd. Return to the earth. A Spirit. He is convulsed-This is to be a mortal, And seek the things beyond mortality. Another Spirit. Yet, see, he mastereth himself, and makes His torture tributary to his will. Had he been one of us, he would have made [Over this fine drama, a moral feeling hangs like a sombrous thunder cloud. No other guilt but that so darkly shadowed out could have furnished so dreadful an illustration of the hideous aberrations of human nature, however noble and majestic, when left a prey to its desires, its passions, and its imagination. The beauty, at one time so innocently adored, is at last soiled, profaned, and violated. Affection, love, guilt, horror, remorse, and death, come in terrible succession, yet all darkly linked together. We think of Astarte as young, beautiful, innocent guilty lost murdered buried judged pardoned; but still, in her permitted visit to earth, speaking in a voice of sorrow, and with a countenance yet pale with mortal trouble. We had but a glimpse of her in her beauty and innocence; but, at last, she rises up before us in all the mortal silence of a ghost, with fixed, glazed, aud passionless eyes, revealing death, judgment, and eternity. The moral breathes and burns in every word, in sadness, misery, insanity, desolation, and death. The work is "instinct with spirit," and in the agony and distraction, and all its dimly imagined causes, we behold, though broken up, confused, and sattered, the elements of a purer existence. WILSON.] 2 [The third Act, as originally written, being shown to Mr. Gifford, he expressed his unfavourable opinion of it very distinctly; and Mr. Murray transmitted this opinion to Lord Byron. The result is told in the following extracts from his letters: Inexplicable stillness! which till now To be of all our vanities the motliest, The merest word that ever fool'd the ear Re-enter HERMAN. Her. My lord, the abbot of St. Maurice craves To greet your presence. Enter the ABBOT OF ST. MAURICE. Abbot. Peace be with Count Manfred! Man. Thanks, holy father! welcome to these walls; Thy presence honours them, and blesseth those Who dwell within them. Abbot. Would it were so, Count!But I would fain confer with thee alone. Man. Herman, retire. What would my reverend guest? Abbot. Thus, without prelude:- Age and zeal, my office, And good intent, must plead my privilege; "Venice, April 14. 1817. The third Act is certainly d-d bad, and, like the Archbishop of Grenada's homily, (which savoured of the palsy,) has the dregs of my fever, during which it was written. It must on no accouni be published in its present state. I will try and reform it, or re-write it altogether; but the impulse is gone, and I have no chance of making any thing out of it. The speech of Manfred to the Sun is the only part of this Act I thought good myself; the rest is certainly as bad as bad can be, and I wonder what the devil possessed me. I am very glad indeed that you sent me Mr. Gifford's opinion without deduction. Do you suppose me such a booby as not, to be very much obliged to him? or that I was not, and am not, convinced and convicted in my conscience of this same overt act of nonsense? I shall try at it again; in the mean time, lay it upon the shelf-the whole Drama I mean. Recollect not to publish, upon pain of I know not what, until I have tried again at the third act. I am not sure that I shall try, and still less that I shall succeed if I do." "Rome, May 5.I have re-written the greater part, and returned what is not altered in the proof you sent me. The Abbot is become a good man, and the Spirits are brought in at the death. You will find, I think, some good poetry in this new Act, here and there; and if so, print it, without sending me farther proofs, under Mr. Gifford's correction, if he will have the goodness to overlook it."] Which are forbidden to the search of man; Man. And what are they who do avouch these things? Abbot. My pious brethren-the scared peasantryEven thy own vassals-who do look on thee With most unquiet eyes. Thy life's in peril. Man. Take it. Abbot. [heaven. I come to save, and not destroyI would not pry into thy secret soul; But if these things be sooth, there still is time For penitence and pity: reconcile thee With the true church, and through the church to Man. I hear thee. This is my reply: whate'er I may have been, or am, doth rest between Heaven and myself. -I shall not choose a mortal To be my mediator. Have I sinn'd Against your ordinances? prove and punish!! Abbot. My son! I did not speak of punishment, But penitence and pardon; - with thyself On the raven-stone, And his black wing flits O'er the milk.white bone; To and fro, as the night-winds blow, The fetters creak - and his ebon beak Croaks to the close of the hollow sound; And this is the tune, by the light of the moon, To which the witches dance their round Merrily, merrily, cheerily, cheerily, Merrily, speeds the ball: The dead in their shrouds, and the demons in clouds, Flock to the witches' carnival. "Raven-stone (Rabenstein), a translation of the German word for the gibbet, which in Germany and Switzerland is permanent, and made of stone." The choice of such remains-and for the last, Our institutions and our strong belief Have given me power to smooth the path from sin His servant echoes back the awful word. Man. Old man! there is no power in holy men, Would make a hell of heaven― can exorcise Can deal that justice on the self-condemn'd Abbot. The victim of a self-inflicted wound, Abbot. I fear thee not- hence hence- But harm him not; and, when the morrow breaks, Convent and all, to bear him company? Man. No, this will serve for the present. Take him up. Ash. Come, friar! now an exorcism or two, And we shall fly the lighter. ASHTAROTH disappears with the ABBOT, singing as follows: A prodigal son, and a maid undone, And a widow re-wedded within the year; MANFRED alone. Man. Why would this fool break in on me, and force My art to pranks fantastical?- no matter, It was not of my secking. My heart sickens, And weighs a fix'd foreboding on my soul: But it is calm calm as a sullen sea After the hurricane; the winds are still, But the cold waves swell high and heavily, And there is danger in them. Such a rest Is no repose. My life hath been a combat, And every thought a wound, till I am scarr'd In the immortal part of me. — What now?"] 2 Otho, being defeated in a general engagement near Brixellum, stabbed himself. Plutarch says, that, though he lived full as badly as Nero, his last moments were those of a philosopher. He comforted his soldiers who lamented his fortune, and expressed his concern for their safety, when they solicited to pay him the last friendly offices. Martial says: "Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Cæsare major, Dum moritur, numquid major Othone fuit?" not loss of life, but ? public death. the torments of a 3 ["To shun { Choose between them."- MS.] It never can be so, To reconcile thyself with thy own soul, And thy own soul with heaven. Hast thou no hope? 'Tis strange -even those who do despair above, Yet shape themselves some fantasy on earth, To which frail twig they cling, like drowning men. To make my own the mind of other men, I knew not whither- it might be to fall; Abbot. And wherefore so? Man. 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 - Abbot. And why not live and act with other men? 1 [This speech has been quoted in more than one of the sketches of the Poet's own life. Much earlier, when only twenty-three years of age, he had thus prophesied :—“ It seems as if I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of old age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered. Other men can always take refuge in their families- I have no resource but my own reflections, and they present no prospect, here or hereafter, except the selfish satisfaction of surviving my betters. I am, indeed, very wretched. My days are listless, and my nights restless. I have very seldom any society; and when I have, I run out of it. I don't know that I sha'n't end with insanity."— Byron Letters, 1811.] ["Of the immortality of the soul, it appears to me that there can be little doubt if we attend for a moment to the action of mind. It is in perpetual activity. I used to doubt it - but reflection has taught me better. How far our future state will be individual; or, rather, how far it will at all resemble our present existence, is another question; but that the mind is eternal seems as probable as that the body is not so."- Byron Diary, 1821.-"I have no wish to reject Christianity without investigation, on the contrary, I am very desirous of believing; for I have no happiness in my present unsettled notions on religion."-Byron Conversations with Kennedy, 1823.] [There are three only, even among the great poets of modern times, who have chosen to depict, in their full shape and vigour, those agonies to which great and meditative And seeketh not, so that it is not sought, I 'gin to fear that thou art past all aid Man. Look on me! there is an order Of mortals on the earth, who do become Old in their youth, and die ere middle age, Without the violence of warlike death; Some perishing of pleasure-some of study. Some worn with toil-some of mere weariness— Some of disease and some insanity - 1 And some of wither'd, or of broken hearts; For this last is a malady which slays More than are number'd in the lists of Fate, Taking all shapes, and bearing many names. Look upon me! for even of all these things Have I partaken; and of all these things, One were enough; then wonder not that I Am what I am, but that I ever was, Or having been, that I am still on earth. Abbot. Yet, hear me stillMan. Old man! I do respect Thine order, and revere thine years; I deem Thy purpose pious, but it is in vain : Think me not churlish; I would spare thyself, Far more than me, in shunning at this time All further colloquy―and so-farewell. 2 [Exit MANFRED. Abb. This should have been a noble creature 3: he Hath all the energy which would have made A goodly frame of glorious elements, Had they been wisely mingled; as it is, It is an awful chaos-light and darkness— And mind and dust-and passions and pure thoughts, intellects are, in the present progress of human history, exposed by the eternal recurrence of a deep and discontented scepticism. But there is only one who has dared to represent himself as the victim of those nameless and undefinable sufferings. Goethe chose for his doubts and his darkness the terrible disguise of the mysterious Faustus. Schiller, with still greater boldness, planted the same anguish in the restless, haughty, and heroic bosom of Wallenstein. But Byron has sought no external symbol in which to embody the inquietudes of his soul. He takes the world, and all that it inherit, for his arena and his spectators; and he displays himself before their gaze, wrestling unceasingly and ineffectually with the demon that torments him. At times, there is something mournful and depressing in his scepticism; but oftener it is of a high and solemn character, approaching to the very verge of a confiding faith. Whatever the poet may believe, we, his readers, always feel ourselves too much ennobled and elevated, even by his melancholy, not to be confirmed in our own belief by the very doubts so majestically conceived and uttered. His scepticism, if it ever approaches to a creed, carries with it its refutation in its grandeur. There is neither philosophy nor religion in those bitter and savage taunts which have been cruelly thrown out, from many quarters, against those moods of mind which are involuntary, and will not pass away; the shadows and spectres which still haunt his imagination may once have disturbed our own-through his gloom there are frequent flashes of illumination; and the sublime sadness which to him is breathed from the mysteries of mortal existence, is always joined with a longing after immortality, and expressed in language that is itself divine. WILSON.] [MANFRED advances to the Window of the Hall. Of early nature, and the vigorous race More beautiful than they, which did draw down Which gladden'd, on their mountain tops, the hearts Who chose thee for his shadow! Thou chief star! And hearts of all who walk within thy rays! [Exit MANFRED. SCENE III. The Mountains-The Castle of Manfred at some distance-A Terrace before a Tower. - Time, Twilight. HERMAN, MANUEL, and other Dependants of MANFRED. Her. "Tis strange enough; night after night, for years, He hath pursued long vigils in this tower, "And it came to pass, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair," &c." There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."- Genesis, ch. vi. verses 2 and 4. [Pray, was Manfred's speech to the Sun still retained in Act third? I hope so: it was one of the best in the thing, and better than the Coliseum.” — Byron Letters, 1817.] 3Some strange things in these few years."— MS ] 4 [The remainder of the third Act, in its original shape, ran thus: Her. Look-look-the towerThe tower's on fire. Oh, heavens and earth! what sound, What dreadful sound is that? [A crash like thunder. Manuel. Help, help, there!-to the rescue of the Count,The Count's in danger, what ho! there! approach! [The Servants. Vassals, and Peasantry approach, stupified with terror. If there be any of you who have heart Or its contents, it were impossible To draw conclusions absolute, of aught His studies tend to. To be sure, there is One chamber where none enter: I would give These walls Oh! I have seen Must change their chieftain first. -- |