MANFRED:

A DRAMATIC POEM.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[Hamlet, Act i. Scene 5, Lines 166, 167.]

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[Manfred, a choral tragedy in three acts, was performed at Covent Garden Theatre, October 29-November 14, 1834 [Denvil (afterwards known as part of "Manfred," and Miss Ellen Tree (afterwards Mrs. Manfred" Denvil) took the Charles Kean) played "The Witch of the Alps "]; at Drury Lane Theatre, October 10, 1863-64 [Phelps played "Manfred," Miss Rosa Le Clercq "The Phantom of Astarte," and Miss Heath "The Witch of the Alps"]; at the Prince's Theatre, Manchester, March 27-April 20, 1867 [Charles Calvert played "Manfred "]; and again, in 1867, under the same management, at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool; and at the Princess's Theatre Royal, London, August 16, 1873 [Charles Dillon played "Manfred;" music by Sir Henry Bishop, as in 1834].

Overtures, etc.

"Music to Byron's Manfred" (overture and incidental music and choruses), by R. Schumann, 1850.

"Incidental Music," composed, in 1897, by Sir Alexander Campbell Mackenzie (at the request of Sir Henry Irving); heard (in part only) at a concert in Queen's Hall, May, 1899.

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Manfred Symphony" (four tableaux after the Poem by Byron), composed by Tschairowsky, 1885; first heard in London, autumn, 1898] K

INTRODUCTION TO MANFRED.

BYRON passed four months and three weeks in Switzerland. He arrived at the Hôtel d'Angleterre at Sécheron, on Saturday, May 25, and he left the Campagne Diodati for Italy on Sunday, October 6, 1816. Within that period he wrote the greater part of the Third Canto of Childe Harold, he began and finished the Prisoner of Chillon, its seven attendant poems, and the Monody on the death of Sheridan, and he began Manfred.

A note to the "Incantation" (Manfred, act i. sc. 1, lines 192-261), which was begun in July and published together with the Prisoner of Chillon, December 5, 1816, records the existence of "an unfinished Witch Drama " (First Edition, p. 46); but, apart from this, the first announcement of his new work is contained in a letter to Murray, dated Venice, February 15, 1817 (Letters, 1900, iv. 52). "I forgot," he writes, "to mention to you that a kind of Poem in dialogue (in blank verse) or drama... begun last summer in Switzerland, is finished; it is in three acts; but of a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind." The letter is imperfect, but some pages of "extracts" which were forwarded under the same cover have been preserved. Ten days later (February 25) he reverts to these "extracts," and on February 28 he despatches a fair copy of the first act. On March 9 he remits the third and final act of his "dramatic poem" (a definition adopted as a second title), but under reserve as to publication, and with a strict injunction to Murray "to submit it to Mr. G[ifford] and to whomsoever you please besides." It is certain that this third act was written at Venice (Letter to Murray, April 14), and it may be taken for granted that the composition of the first two acts belongs to the tour in the Bernese Alps (September 17-29), or to the last days at Diodati (September 30 to October 5, 1816), when the estro (see Letter to Murray, January 2, 1817) was upon him, when his "Passions slept," and, in spite of all that had come and gone and could not go, his spirit was uplifted by the "majesty and the power and the glory" of Nature.

Gifford's verdict on the first act was that it was "wonderfully poetical" and "merited publication," but, as Byron had

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foreseen, he did not "by any means like " the third act. It was, as its author admitted (Letter to Murray, April 14) "damnably bad," and savoured of the dregs of a fever,' for which the Carnival (Letter to Murray, February 28) or, more probably, the climate and insanitary "palaces" of Venice were responsible. Some weeks went by before there was either leisure or inclination for the task of correction, but at Rome the estro returned in full force, and on May 5 a "new third act of Manfred-the greater part rewritten," was sent by post to England. Manfred, a Dramatic Poem, was published June 16, 1817.

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Manfred was criticized by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review (No. lvi., August, 1817, vol. 28, pp. 418-431), and by John Wilson in the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (afterwards Blackwood's, etc.) (June, 1817, i. 289-295). Jeffrey, as Byron remarked (Letter to Murray, October 12, 1817), was very kind," and Wilson, whose article "had all the air of being a poet's," was eloquent in its praises. But there was a fly in the ointment." A suggestion" had been thrown out, "in an ingenious paper in a late number of the Edinburgh Magazine [signed H. M. (John Wilson), July, 1817], that the general conception of this piece, and much of what is excellent in the manner of its execution, have been borrowed from the Tragical History of Dr. Faustus of Marlow (sic);" and from this contention Jeffrey dissented. A note to a second paper on Marlowe's Edward II. (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, October, 1817) offered explanations, and echoed Jeffrey's exaltation of Manfred above Dr. Faustus; but the mischief had been done. Byron was evidently perplexed and distressed, not by the papers in Blackwood, which he never saw, but by Jeffrey's remonstrance in his favour; and in the letter of October 12 he is at pains to trace the "evolution" of Manfred. "I never read," he writes, " and do not know that I ever saw the Faustus of Marlow;" and, again, 66 As to the Faustus of Marlow, I never read, never saw, nor heard of it." "I heard Mr. Lewis translate verbally some scenes of Goethe's Faust. .. last summer" (see, too, Letter to Rogers, April 4, 1817), which is all I know of the history of that magical personage; and as to the germs of Manfred, they may be found in the Journal which I sent to Mrs. Leigh... when I went over first the Dent, etc., shortly before I left Switzerland. I have the whole scene of Manfred before me."

...

Again, three years later he writes (à propos of Goethe's review of Manfred, which first appeared in print in his paper Kunst und Alterthum, June, 1820, and is republished in Goethe's Sämmtliche Werke... Stuttgart, 1874, xiii. 640

642; see Letters, 1901, v. Appendix II. "Goethe and Byron," pp. 503-521): "His Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis (sic), in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the Staubach (sic) and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar" (Letter to Murray, June 7, 1820, Letters, 1901, v. 36). Medwin (Conversations, etc., pp. 210, 211), who of course had not seen the letters to Murray of 1817 or 1820, puts much the same story into Byron's mouth. Now, with regard to the originality of Manfred, it may be taken for granted that Byron knew nothing about the "Faustlegend," or the "Faust-cycle." He solemnly denies that he had ever read Marlowe's Faustus, or the selections from the play in Lamb's Specimens, etc. (see Medwin's Conversations, etc., pp. 208, 209, and a hitherto unpublished Preface to Werner, vol. v.), and it is highly improbable that he knew anything of Calderon's El Mágico Prodigioso, which Shelley translated in 1822, or of "the beggarly elements" of the legend in Hroswitha's Lapsus et Conversio Theophili Vice-domini. But Byron's Manfred is "in the succession" of scholars who have reached the limits of natural and legitimate science, and who essay the supernatural in order to penetrate and comprehend the "hidden things of darkness." A predecessor, if not a progenitor, he must have had, and there can be no doubt whatever that the primary conception of the character, though by no means the inspiration of the poem, is to be traced to the "Monk's" oral rendering of Goethe's Faust, which he gave in return for his "bread and salt" at Diodati. Neither Jeffrey nor Wilson mentioned Faust, but the writer of the notice in the Critical Review (June, 1817, series v. vol. 5, pp. 622-629) avowed that "this scene (the first) is a gross plagiary from a great poet whom Lord Byron has imitated on former occasions without comprehending. Goethe's Faust begins in the same way ;" and Goethe himself, in a letter to his friend Knebel, October, 1817, and again in his review in Kunst und Alterthum, June, 1820, emphasizes whilst he justifies and applauds the use which Byron had made of his work. "This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strangest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." Afterwards (see record of a conversation with Herman Fürst

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