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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In The Great Chain of Being Professor Lovejoy pointed out that in the eighteenth century a profound change took place in the ways of thinking about the universe—from conceiving of it as static and complete to conceiving of it as organic and infinitely changing. Recently, in The Subtler Language, Earl Wasserman has discussed the acute artistic problems that this shift in thought created for the poet. Until the end of the eighteenth century there were certain “cosmic syntaxes” in the public domain such as the Christian interpretation of history and the concept of the great chain of being which the poet could expect his audience to recognize and accept. He “could transform language by means of them, and could survey reality and experience in the presence of the world these syntaxes implied… By the nineteenth century these world pictures had passed from consciousness for the purpose of public poetry, and no longer did men share in any significant degree a sense of cosmic design.” Therefore, says Wasserman, the Romantic poets—and poets ever since—have been forced to formulate their own cosmic syntax and “shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits.”
1 Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). See in particular chs. ix and x.
2 Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 10–11.
3 The Poetry of Lord Byron, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London, 1898–1904), v, 207. All quotations will be from this edition. For the literary and Biblical background of the drama see S. C. Chew, The Dramas of Lord Byron (Gôttingen, 1915), pp. 118–128.
4 Lovejoy, pp. 213, 222.
5 Quoted by Lovejoy, p. 215.
6 For a discussion of the speculations of Act ii in relation to Byron's general religious and philosophical views, see Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., Byron: The Record of a Quest (Austin, Tex., 1949), pp. 208–212.
7 See letter to Murray, 3 November 1821, in Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. R. E. Prothero (London, 1898–1901), v, 469–470. Hereafter referred to as LJ.
8 In The Ghost of Abel, etched in 1822 and addressed to “Lord Byron in the Wilderness,” Blake presents the ghost of Abel demanding revenge in his turn from Jehovah, who is here the symbol of gentleness and forgiveness, the equivalent of Jesus in Jerusalem. Jehovah refuses and Abel sinks into the grave from which arises Satan (not Byron's Lucifer but Blake's God of this World) to cry that he is the God of men and that Jehovah himself will be sacrificed to Satan on Calvary. In other words, Blake perceives that in the obsequious Abel is the spirit of revenge, and that it is from such as he that the “God of men” arises or gains his power. Though he would not have sympathized with Byron's scepticism, Blake must have been delighted to find Byron inverting the conventional symbols of good and evil in much the same way that he had inverted them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Lucifer has much in common with Blake's devils. Blake's principal objection to Byron's interpretation would seem to be that he confused Jehovah with the God of this World.
9 See letter to Murray, 12 September 1821, in LJ, v, 361.
10 The rhetorical retreat into orthodoxy at the end of the play results in part from the same factors responsible for Byron's ambiguous and vacillating protestations of orthodoxy in his preface and letters. Like many a sceptic, he was a little awed by his own audacity and refused to face directly the full implications of his thought. He also recoiled from any head-on clash with religious authority. When Cain was attacked he fell instinctively into defensive sophistry. The letters to Moore and Murray are to be taken neither at face value nor as deliberately disingenuous. They are intended to appease and assuage and to make his heretical potions palatable. For Byron's protestations see Edward Marjarum, Byron as Sceptic and Believer (Princeton, 1938), pp. 32–35.
11 See letter to Hobhouse, 12 October 1821, in Lord Byron's Correspondence, ed. John Murray (London, 1922), ii, 203.
