certain sense Fausts, but Manfred in a particular degree; and, though the idea that Byron’s tragedy was borrowed from Goethe’s could proceed only from a superficial knowledge of his lordship’s character, and from an ignorance of the circumstances which gave rise to the composition of that poem, it is not the less certain that there is a great resemblance between the character of Manfred and that of Faust. From what this resemblance proceeds Lord Byron has himself most satisfactorily told us:—“It was the Steinbach, and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faust,”[i22] that produced the gigantic Titan-like apparition of Manfred. That something else here mentioned was Lord Byron himself, who, had he lived in the sixteenth century, would probably enough have been a magician (at all events a Giordano Bruno), and might have been immortalised by some modern poet as the great English Doctor Faust. How, then, does Manfred stand as compared with Faust? Exactly in the same way, we must assume, as Byron stands when contrasted with Goethe. Byron is more sublime; Goethe more human. Byron has more wing; Goethe a better use of his wing. Byron is more intense, more impetuous, and more forcible; Goethe more rich, more various, more mellow, and more ripe. But the chief difference is this, that in all his poetry Goethe is wise; Byron never. Accordingly, we may say that with all its grandeur Manfred is essentially a mad poem. It overleaps the bounds of all sane thinking with no apparent purpose, and certainly with little apparent effect but the glorification of monstrous pride. Still there is a moral lesson at the root of the story, if the reader will take the trouble to think it out. The man who could find no pleasure in existence, except in the gratification of an unnatural passion, could end only as Manfred ended, and die communing with his own proud soul and the evoked spirits of earth and air, amid the frost-bound ridges of the Alps. But, in order to attain this solitary Titanic sublimity, the poet has sacrificed all human probability and all human interest. It is a sublime poem, Manfred; but it is the sublime of monstrosity. The sublime of the Prometheus of Æschylus is a very different thing: it is the sublime, in the first place, not of an unnatural man, but of a god; and, in the second place, it is the sublime of a soul inspired by ill-regulated philanthropy, not by unchastened passion. I presume there are few things finer in the English language than that midnight soliloquy in the third act of Manfred, when the Count, looking forth from his lonely tower on the stars and the snow-shining mountains, recalls a night spent amid the ruins of the Colosseum, and the palace of the Cæsars in Rome—a soliloquy which certainly will lose nothing by a detailed
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