Satanic And Byronic Hero , An Overview Satan, Hamlet And Manfred

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STATANAC AND BYRONIC HERO, AN OVERVIEW

SATAN, HAMLET AND MANFRED

INTRODUCTION

Argument

The mythology and the ancient epic were right to exist only to enhance and raise the heroes of strength and virtue models; in fact, in the Iliad, the story of a war between peoples in defense of their reputation, do not highlight an array of "good" and a "bad", but in both stand valiant heroes (such as Hector and Aeneas on the one hand, Achilles and Odysseus other) fighting for different causes but still conform to their values ​​(the honor, the glory, the defense of the motherland, solidarity with allies)

The character who most frequently encountered in the literary works of the early nineteenth century is the romantic hero, a man who is fiercely opposed to social conventions, expressing violent passions and who has a lively sense of the adventure in which they seek satisfaction her desire for freedom and his great individualism. The romantic basis of ethics is the Jacobi transcendentalist "philosopher's thought if pulse is duty." This issue arises particularly in the center of the movement of the "Sturm und Drang" in Germany, but is also developed greatly in England; The romantic hero is the lonely rebel who, proud of his spiritual superiority and strength, contemptuous of mediocrity, stands to defy all authority, every law, every limit, to affirm his freedom and individuality exceptional (defined titanism) attitude.

Defined variously as a lifestyle, “a set of traits supposedly characterizing Byron's texts” or his hallmark hero, or the “developments that allowed Byron to become a celebrity in Britain”, Byronism is a nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon that changed significantly the relationship between author, text and audience and whose echoes resonated well beyond the customary sphere of influence of British culture.

In this thesis the Satanic and Byronic hero, as portrayed by illustrious English poets, is the major theme. We consider this study to be important given the influence of this kind of romantic characters on the literature of the following ages. In the context of modern literature the theme remains present, as it is widely used and renowned due to the complexity of problems circumscribed to the concept of “Byronic hero”.

To illustrate the theme of the work, I chose to analyze the romantic literary characters of British authors who had a major impact on European literature: Shakespeare’ Hamlet, Milton’s Satan, Shelly’s Prometheus and Byron’s Manfred.

The study is structured on three main chapters, the Introduction and Conclusions.

The introduction presents the life and literary creations of Lord Byron, the poet of reference for the romantic characters, who inspired an entire generation and an entire literary movement. Of course, the introductory part will include references to the other authors analyzed in this study as well as to the historic age they lived in.

Chapter I represents an overview of Shakespeare’ Hamlet, Milton’s Satan, Shelly’s Prometheus and Byron’s Manfred, a presentation of authors’ approach to the theme of satanic and Byronic hero.

Chapter II is dedicated to evaluation of the main traits of satanic and Byronic heroes’ personality, the dark side and the positive side of each hero.

Chapter III will probe based on the first two chapters, if there is a dichotomy between Satanic and Byronic heroes, and what the main constituents of this dichotomy are.

Finally, the conclusions will emphasize the complexity of Satanic and Byronic hero concept, and its relevance for modern literature, as this kind of romantic character has became a real archetype.

George Gordon Byron – The rise and fall; creation

1.1 Early years

George Gordon, future Lord Byron, was born on 22 January 1788. In good measure, George Gordon Byron inherited the emotional inconstancy and unpredictable behavior of his father, Captain Jack Byron, "Mad Jack", whose ancestors descended from an ancient family of Vikings.

"Mad Jack" whose personality emitted an irresistible charm scandalized his contemporaries by atypical behavior and by defying all norms of morality of the time.

Mad Jack’s first wife died in 1784, leaving behind a daughter, Augusta, whose life will cut across dramatically with the poet’s turbulent lifestyle. Jack Byron has remarried the following year with Lady Catherine Gordon of Gight, descended from the royal family of Stuart. George was born with a “club-foot”: right leg was twisted to the left. But with the native pride inherited from the mother, he defied the infirmity and his willingness to overcome physical disability was enormous. Almost ten years he persistently practiced riding, boxing and frequently swam in the waters of the Thames, also he learned to duel.

Ten years later, after the death of his uncle, Byron inherited the nobility title and the domain of Newstead Abbey in Nottingham County.

Full of importance, the arrogant and willful young man started his studies at Harrow elementary school. After taking private classes, be becomes a charming and rebellious student at [anonimizat] in Cambridge. He brought a bear once in campus just to tease the Administration who has forbidden the students to keep dogs. He already wrote poems with extreme easiness and published the first volume of poetry, Hours of Idleness, in 1807, while he was still in Cambridge. In Cambridge period, it became obvious his remarkable ability to attract friends and passionate and devotees admirers. John Cam Hobhouse, the future lord Broughton, became one of his closest friends; he will be the Byron's traveling companion and will executor. At the end of his studies in Cambridge, the young man has a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin, passionately read ancient literature; he was a profound connoisseur of English literature, classical and contemporary. He was fascinated with both historical studies and biographies of prominent people.

Like many other nobles at the time, Byron spent his day riding around, doing fencing, rowing, and hunting and partied with friends from college and charming and benevolent maids from the estate. Eager to amaze, he drinks wine after dinner from a golden skull. After everyone went to bed, he liked to write until dawn. When he was admitted to the House of Lords, at the age of 21, young, bored and extravagant, he decided to start an unusually adventurous journey in Southern Europe, which would carry him through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Greece and Albania. Romantic, imagining himself "a young exile", he felt at home as he stepped on the soil of Greece and soon began writing a poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. At that time, the area was ruled by a depraved tyrant, Turk Ali Pasha, who was charmed by Byron's look and offered him gifts, trying to obtain a gallant meeting with him. The young nobleman politely dismissed him, although he was not necessarily against homosexual experiences.

Gradually, Byron becomes embraced the cause of Greece independence from the Ottoman Empire. Byron’s growing interest in politics went along with personal adventures, more and more various. Returned to Athens, he is involved in sexual relationships many women, girls and even boys.

The popularity of lord Byron – literary and moral causes

The new or the old grown into new again becomes the first cause of the fortune of books. This was not the least of the attractions of Lord Byron. It is true that the new in his poems was poetry itself. Since Pope and Dryden, England had had more than one skilful writer in verse, but it had not had a great poet. The history of English poetry offers a succession of descriptive or didactic poems. Sensibility is rather a tone adopted by the poet, where it is fitting that the heart should be seriously moved by the sadness of human affairs. These poets considered as poetic all that is natural, and as natural all that passed for being so in their time. After Pope, and at the time when Lord Byron wrote his first verses, agreeable poets brought art back to the innocent path of the play of the mind. Wordsworth, Thomas Moore, Coleridge, Walter Scott, Southey himself, Lord Byron's Cotin, found, between the abstract man of Pope's school and the man characterized by his condition, in Crabbe’s view, a romantic man of legends and ballads. They made the poetic language more precious, or, like Southey, more bizarre, without renewing it.

Great was the surprise of this society, when in January 1812 the first two songs of Childe-Harold revealed to him a great poet. The Orient itself, its sun, its perfumes, its pearls, the beautiful black eyes behind the veil, the mysterious love under the yatagan's point, have become a common place. Byron renewed the description by chasing away the abstractions and the inventory detail, and by bringing back the feeling. In Childe-Harold there was a painting, the most original and the most interesting of all the paintings, an independent spirit, in a country where everyone is subject to a rule, an emancipated thinker, and a man speaking of him.

It was through the frame that Lord Byron had attracted passers-by; it was by the picture that he attracted and fixed the serious minds.

A glance at a book, a cloud of passing doubt, a nudity that one has seen in spite of oneself. Liberator for a few, tempting for the greatest number, Byron was admired by all. The very small number that the harshness of a militant opinion, a position in view, a faith more to the test, irritated against the seductions of the thinker, rendered the arms to the beauties of the poet. Every one made a secret and strange friendship with Lord Byron.

This was the most general cause of the success of Lord Byron. Beside men readers, his works were read especially by women for a particular and romantic cause. They secretly express themselves by his heroes, or rather by the uniqueness which he has given to all, from that mixture of goodness up to heroism, and from evil up to crime. Only good is to the honor of the personage, and the evil in the charge of the society, which has not been able to make him enough space nor give him enough air. He is great by his will; it is by circumstances that it becomes criminal: a seductive type that appeals to women.

To the peculiar attraction of this contrast, the favorite personage has the first quality of a man in the eyes of the women, his most beautiful title: fidelity. All the heroes of Lord Byron are faithful. The Giaour, Selim, in the Bride of Abydos; Conrad, in the Corsair and in the novel where he reappears under the name of Lara; Hugo, in Parisina, are types of fidelity in love. Finally, it is not even Don Juan who, in his many loves, is faithful to his way. Very different from his prototype, he likes only one woman at a time, and if he leaves her, it is by necessity and not by caprice.

As for Lord Byron, perhaps, he wanted him to be capable of it; perhaps in the depths of his heart he sincerely adored the ideal. Is not love, fidelity to this love, rather a rarity than a chimera?

In vain did he defend himself from any resemblance to his personages. What was known of him, what was said at least, allowed confusion. In his short and stormy life, Lord Byron played in turn some of the parts of his characters. This contrast of extreme generosity and contempt for men is his whole history. On a tumble stone Byron dared to write that the dog is better than man, and he sacrificed his fortune, his health and his life to the cause of humanity personified in slave Greece.

Finally, it is known that, in order to paint the exterior of his heroes, he had consulted his mirror more than his imagination, and had done it exceptionally. Poetry raises everything: the author, if his person is below his talents; the work, if the subject or the thoughts are not worthy of the art. Romantic prose can make types of fantasy; poetry alone has the privilege of making an ideal. Beauty is more beautiful, and ugliness appears less. It seems that nothing vulgar exists in this privileged language, nor that a poet of genius can ever be sarcastic or hostile. These were, if I am not mistaken, the causes of the popularity of Lord Byron during his lifetime. This popularity was like a fever. No author has attracted more general and ardent attention. The flow of his poems is one of the most curious facts in the history of letters. The Giaour, which followed the first two chants of Childe-Harold, had been published in May, 1813; nine months later, in January 1814, criticism reported on the eleventh edition. In the same month appeared the seventh of the Bride of Abydos, published in December 1813. The Corsair, began on December 18, 1813, and ended on the 31st, appeared in January 1814, and in its April issues the Edinburg Review spoke of the fifth edition.

Lord Byron’s volunteer exile – the causes of the disgrace of man in the biggest popularity of the poet

However, at the height of Lord Byron's popularity, a storm was gathering upon his head: to the expression of the grates admiration for the poetic beauties of his works, the Revues have added from the beginning the worries about his opinions. These suspicions became more precise and severe in proportion as the poet grew, and the admiration for him did not decrease. Despite Lord Byron’s declarations, they persisted in recognizing him in his heroes, and in making him responsible for their feelings. What had transpired from his life only confirmed these suspicions on the real identity of Byronic heroes. The vaults of Newstead have not been discreet, and what was said about it would have frightened even a society less formal than English society. His friends even took the part of the troubled consciences against him, and it was impossible for them not to admire him and not to blame him, altogether.

Lord Byron was shaken. Already master of spirits, he felt that he would not become master of conduct, and after the prodigious success of the Corsair, he thought for a moment not only to stop writing, but to destroy all that he had already published. This disappointment was dissipated by writing Lara; but the cause remained: a sure instinct had warned Lord Byron that he became incompatible with his country as he became popular. His separation from his wife was a misfortune but the poet was blamed for it even by his close relations. England did not judge him by jury; all England saw was a respectable young woman leaving the conjugal home and taking refuge with her father. It was enough; the society demands less evidence than the courts. He left England in 1821 and never returned. He had wished to enter into a struggle with English society; he was defeated. There was no scandal, although the vanity of Lord Byron would have hoped.

Legal justice grants to the very crime attenuating circumstances; it authorizes the judge to discern between calculated perversity and the exercise of passion. In its admiration for Byron’s superior talent, the society characterizes him with all the words that most strongly portray passion: enthusiasm, a poetic fire, a divine breath, and so on, but punishes him for going beyond the society’s moral standards. If there is anything more respectable than genius, than it is doubtless a nation which defends its manners.

This way, the English society censured the attacks on its beliefs made by Lord Byron. It is true that he accepted neither judgment nor punishment. He confessed only the incompatibility between his country and himself. But the incompatibility leaves the honor of the parties intact.

However, Lord Byron has accused English society of hypocrisy.

At his funeral, magnificent hearse was followed by three carriages filled with faithful friends of the deceased, then, one after another, the 47 carriages of the noblest families in England; bizarre, but not surprising for the funeral of a poet revered worldwide and despised in his own country, carriages were empty. The high class society gave its final response to Lord Byron.

The causes of lord Byron’s fall

Since the death of Lord Byron, English society has continued to defend itself against the glory of this great poet. The society’s vibrant admiration during his life diminishes or extinguishes after his death. The enchantment lasted so long as the enchanter lived. The dead are soon forgotten, the most forgotten are those who have spoken the most about them. The ideal of his poems was his person; his person disappeared, the ideal vanishes: it was a first disgrace.

The second one comes from Church. In both, Low Church and Anglican Church, Lord Byron was proscribed. Lord Byron and the devil, priests said, is all one.

Lord Byron does not think of referring to God all this beauty of the earth. What he loves in nature is the refuge he finds against societies; it is because there is no longer any struggle with men or controversy with opinions. He felt unchained in the presence of the mountains and the sea. God or Christian thinking is not a presence in his poems. His way of life equally offended the church, and Westminster Abbey refused the burial in the cathedral under the reason of “questionable morality”. He was buried in Nottinghamshire. It was only in 1969 that a memorial to him was placed in Westminster Abbey.

Byron's work and existence have exercised, even in his life time, a deep influence on his contemporaries. Both have created in Europe a psycho-sociological phenomenon, known as "Byronism". Fluidly semantic, the notion crystallized itself by addition of several constituents. The man himself was charming. Youth, elegance, the physical beauty, his eccentric structure, his rebel speech in the Parliament, numerous and scandalous romantic and fleeting love affairs, brilliant success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage – five successive editions only in 1812 – have made Byron even that year, a legendary figure in England and on the continent. Perceived as an archetype of the romantic traveler to whom the author was fallacious identified, Childe Harold's experiences revealed by his peregrinations the native spiritual aspiration to be outside the institutional constraints.

Like Zeluco, the protagonist of the novel with the same title, published by John Moore in 1786, Harold knew the heterogeneous register of pleasures and wandered through the labyrinth of the seven deadly sins. Unlike that, Harold often felt his soul torn by "strange pangs" … "as if the memory of some deadly feud" or the disappointment of a secret passion: "or passion lurk'd disappointed below". Tortured by remorse, Harold sees his loneliness among others: "none did love him – not his lemans dear" – and pluck himself from the torrents of an inauthentic existence. He felt he could no longer endure "the fullness of satiety." Disappointment generates rebellion against his own past. No longer bear his native country because it seemed sadder than a prison cell of a hermit: "… then loath'd he in his native land to dwell, / Which seem'd to him more lone than Eremit's sad cell." Harold leaves England without a sigh, "without a sigh he left". Leave for unknown destinations, bringing with him a perpetual suffering soul, the inner expression of discontent. The trip signifies both a desire for change and return to the depths of the psyche. The "astonished" contemplation of space – noted Andrei Plesu – is the shortest path "to your deepest look, to your archetypal ‘age’." From this perspective, the narrator reconstructs through introspection the reasons for going away.

Cain, Manfred and other Byron’s characters resemble to the lonely pilgrim knight. All reveal structures of character, psychological traits and behavior of stunning originality. All are disappointed by the conformism of the contemporaries, dissatisfied with the society they live in, all distinguish themselves by solitude, demonism, devastating passions, all crossing the space of mental suffering, fighting injustice in an imaginary universe. Cosmic and terrestrial elements are dissolved in a meditative melancholy. Lyrical narrative discreetly raise the veil on human relations, makes a critic of state institutions, affirms boundless freedom of creation and praises thinking, as the only refuge of human destiny: "Our right of thought – our last and only love / Of refuge … " The poet's adventurous existence intimate life stripped of conventionalism, the involvement in the Italian revolutionary movement of Carbonari, in the Greece national liberation fight – had, in the epoch, a similar impact as his work. Byron’s life and creation contributed in identical measure to shape "Byronism" and its psychosocial dimensions.

Given the above, at first glance we might conclude that Byron, the poet, was inspired by George Gordon Byron. However, this conclusion would be superficial, because we have to remember that Byron was a scholar in Greek mythology and a deep connoisseur of English literature.

Consequently in building Byronic hero, the poet started from ancient archetypes of the Titans whom added his own spiritual and intellectual depth, his own experience. I think the real matter is not Byron using himself as model for his heroes but if Byron tried to live up to these titanic characters.

CHAPTER I – SATANIC AND BYRONIC HERO: AN OVERVIEW

The aesthetic and philosophical roots of English Romanticism

England, in addition to Germany, was the place where criticism against the rationalistic values ​​of enlightenment and those of scientific materialism found in its aesthetics and art discovery ground upon the greatest personalities of the time. Before going to analyze the programmatic manifesto of authentic English romance, it is appropriate to see how this was characterized by a historical-cultural point of view.

The first distinctive feature is that the change of sensibility in England occurred earlier than in other European countries, and one of the main reasons is that in this country the tradition of classicism was less rooted and operating than elsewhere. In Identity Fables Northorp Frye states that this period has always been affected by the lack of a clear historical label. He also prefers to avoid the term pre-romanticism by preferring the definition of age of sensitivity.

The beginning of English romanticism, in fact, dates back to 1740. Romantic poets are original because they are in a new situation The English poet's world has already changed before 1750. The revolutionary factor is in the new audience that follows and consumes literature. An ever increasing number of English is able to read and enjoy a greater level of well-being that gives him the opportunity to have books and time to read them. Depending on their way of dealing with the society of time, British romantic poets can be divided into three groups: the first expresses a tendency of opposition, even if it is not yet those revolutionaries’ feelings of the middle and provincial classes that would then be manifested in the half-century preceding the French Revolution. The second, about 1795 until 1812 (the years in which England was in war with post-revolutionary France) – it serves the same provincial backgrounds and an accessible natural language, while drastically reformulating the opposition message by making it religiously orthodox and politically loyalist. The third, from 1812 to 1824, is far less provincial and democratic: in fact, poetics by Byron and Shelley are as aristocratic as their social origins, although this does not prevent them from challenging the policy of the British government more boldly and directly than their predecessors.

There is another important historical schematic of English romance. In fact, he divides this period into three main periods. The first period, from 1798 to 1832, is qualified as an ethical period since the first generation of great romantic poets has a doctrine and ethical orientation as relevant as the aesthetic. The second period, from 1832 to 1875, is that of the Victorian compromise characterized, in a romantic sensibility, from a certain return to rationalism. The last period, from 1875 to 1914, is that of the anti-Postwar reaction characterized by the birth of decadents’ aesthetics, attention to social problems, joined by writers such as Shaw, Wells and Chesterton.

It is not to be underestimated, then, that the early withdrawal of the new romantic sensibility in England manifested itself at the same time as the Industrial Revolution which took shape in the second half of the eighteenth century to extend itself to the next century. The romantic man is in direct relation with the variety of problems caused by the Industrial Revolution such as machine violence against the creative freedom and subjectivity of the person and the new kind of existence caused by industrialization. This close relationship between the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the new pre-romantic sensibility is also highlighted by Pagnini. He warns us not to forget that "the first romantics did not separate political-social interests from the poetic ones, and were part of the great events of the crucial period from 1757 to 1827, namely the birth of democracy and, precisely, the terrible results of the Industrial Revolution: hunger, illness, alienation, and loss. Of course, these were contingent causes that led to the change of sensitivity, linked to the historical-economic situation in England.

More decisive in the English cultural transformation was the formation of a general state of mind on a European scale, which we saw in the previous paragraph, which led to the emergence of new tendencies of thought through German intellectuals of the second half of the eighteenth century. As it happened in Germany, even in England, there was a profound discomfort to the rationalistic values ​​of enlightenment and scientific materialism. First, it was translated into the consequent continuation of the Middle Ages, understood as a period that ranged from the early barbarian times to the whole Renaissance, that is, in the revaluation of works and periods of history in which the direct expression of sentiment prevailed.

In this typical eighteenth-century tendency, named Gothic revival, the poets and the artists turned their attention to, believing that rationality could not fully satisfy the needs of the spirit, values ​​of primitivism and that is, the expression of feelings and passions, the taste for the particular, the description of the landscape and the suggestion of the ruins. The most important example, in this sense, can be seen in the rediscovery by James Machperson of the epic songs of the Gaelic Bards and the Scottish Highlands. Machperson translated and collected these songs in 1760 in a volume titled Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic and attributed to Ossian. In the characteristics of these songs, like the mysterious views of a Nordic landscape, the simple and primitive nature of warriors, the simplicity and the freedom of poetic technique, all the elements of the era of sensitivity can be traced back to them: the importance given to fantasy, sentiment and poetic evasion from canons and pre-established rules.

Fundamental to the formation of romantic mentality in England was also the wise philosophical inquiry into the Origin of our sublime and beautiful ideas by Edmund Burke, first published in 1757 and in 1759 in the second enlarged edition. With the category of the sublime, already theorized by Boileau, Addison and Baille, he continued the process of liberation of sentiment that British poets and romantic critics in their productions will accomplish in the first half of the nineteenth century. This category was an important weapon for all those who attacked the rules of classicism, as the emphasis was placed on the importance of the strongest emotions and the irrational aspects of art and man. The good fortune of this concept was the most obvious testimony of the close ties that English romance clashed with the developments of the aesthetic reflection of the 18th century. What characterizes English romantic aesthetics is interest in primitive (or believed so) literatures the rediscovery of Gothic architecture, the vogue of the black novel, and all those new orientations of taste that, on a theoretical level, find expression in the concept of sublime, which, starting from the middle of the century, coincides with that of beautiful, and that comes to justify the attraction exerted by the terrible, the grandiose , the dark, the violent: in short, by the force that distorts the form; all these phenomena can be interpreted as manifestations of a shift of accent, within the aesthetic theory, from reason to imagination and from imitation to the expression, which culminates in fact in romantic aesthetics. The birth of the English romantic age was the release of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, but it is the Preface to the second edition of 1800 that outlined poetics of the new movement. In 1798, along with the first edition of the Ballads, it is also issued a brief warning to the reader in which Wordsworth confessed to the reader the experimental character of those poems: they were written primarily to verify to what extent the conversation language of the middle classes and low society is suitable for the sake of poetic pleasure. Wordsworth hoped readers, in reading poetry, do not allow that the simple word Poetry, a term with very uncertain meaning, to disrupt their pleasure, but rather they are wondering as they read this book if it contains a natural description of human passions, human characters, human events. The language chosen for poetry had to reflect that of common speech in order to properly narrate the passions and feelings of humble people. Such a conception of poetic language leads Wordsworth to criticize the neoclassical poetics. Wordsworth wanted to describe, for example, the tragic nature of the existential state of peasants through everyday words that have nothing to do with classical poetic dictation and predetermined choice codes. The Preface to the second edition in 1802, is enlarged by the author with a full body of about ten paragraphs. Wordsworth begins with defining poetry as "spontaneous overflowing with strong feelings". In this definition concentrates the core of the romantic vision of art. But the romantic conception of poetry, was not only a simple exaltation of the passions and feelings of the poet. In romantic theories and poetics, there were both a positive evaluation of the conscious and critical control exercised by the artist on his production, and an exaltation of the immediacy that can come to the apology of unconscious and irrefutable creation. It is in this sense that one can frame Wordsworth's details of his earlier definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of strong feelings.

Another fundamental document of English romanticism was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Literary Biography. The relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge was friendship, but also rivalry. Initially, the two poets, seemed to have a common understanding of poetry, but then, following the positions expressed by Coleridge in the Literary Biography in 1817, there was a departure, culminating in Coleridge's criticism of past common positions. Coleridge has seen the poetry an art derived from his conception of artwork as an organism. Of this organic conception of the work of art, Coleridge spoke in almost all his writings of theory and literary criticism. In the literary biography for example, speaking of Milton and Shakespeare's poetry, he states: "I would say with precision that it would be easier to extract a stone from the pyramids with your hands than to alter a word or a position of a word, In Milton or in Shakespeare (at least in the most important works) without telling the author something different and of less value than the one he says." The organic concept of art in Coleridge is framed, from a more general philosophical point of view, to the controversy with the enlightenment mentality. All the poetic reflection of Coleridge is, in fact, set against the association theories of the functioning of the psyche. The same distinction between Fantasy and Imagination, is the distinction between a mechanical faculty and an organic faculty and in all its writings, it is continually helping with the organic metaphors of the plant to describe the process of formation of poetry. The term Fantasy was attributed to a mechanical activity that is based in memory and operates according to the laws of association of ideas, expression of neoclassical poetics. Imagination, in Coleridge’s opinion, is the faculty of producing forms and meanings, expression of the creativity and genius of the artist. The creative power of the Imagination is thus not simply a reproduction of reality, but through symbols and metaphors, it consists in illuminating and giving sense to things by recombining sensorial data in a creative way. This was a typically romantic aesthetic concept. It assumes that conception of nature as an organism which, as we have seen, is an integral part of all romantic thinking: "Fantasy operates within the 'poetic rules' and 'neoclassical' decorum, while Imagination produces free forms that in essence it is a transfer of the aesthetic aspect of the opposition – variously discussed in the eighteenth century and in the following century – between the mechanical conception of the world and the organic conception. Analogous to the advent of the World, an activity that proceeds to its own shape based on the vital energy underlying it. The act of Fantasy resembles this to the Creator of the universe. And the recurring analogy is that of living organisms. The distinction between Fantasy and Imagination finally represented the other great contrast between Coleridge and Wordsworth, which, according to Coleridge, did not clearly distinguish between Imagination and Fantasy, as he defined both the faculties as associative and aggregative. 

Byron’s romanticism

In the history of the English romantics, Byron holds a special place. From the European point of view, he is the main representative of the movement, the man who has embodied in himself the essential qualities and, by his exalting example, imposed them on the civilized world. From the usual English point of view, he is hardly a romantic, but rather a survival of the eighteenth century, and the enemy of many things that the true romantics venerated deeply.

Byron's contemporaries undoubtedly felt hostility between their ideas and the inspiration of the author of Manfred. Wordsworth regarded him as "a man of genius whose heart is perverted." It is true that the judgment of Wordsworth, who, by the way, saw Keats as "pagan" – was not always particularly sure, but in this case he was supported by that of Coleridge, who did not hesitate to describe Byron's later works as "satanic."

The diagnosis that Wordsworth and Coleridge had posed on Byron’s poetry was:

What a frightful specimen of human nature is this man, to whom there is no longer any pleasure but to feast, to taunt them, of the most sublime events of life. It is a very puny originality, which consists in making amusing what is solemn, and solemn what is amusing. And yet it will fascinate thousands of people, by this very diabolical outrage that it inflicts on their sympathies. The perverted education of Byron leads him to pretend to experience and to try to communicate to others these depraved sensations, which the lack of any education excites in many people.

This hostility was reciprocal. It is well known that the "flamboyant romanticist," as M. Charpentier has called him, held in low esteem the poetry of those of his contemporaries, whose posterity has consecrated their importance. He placed Wordsworth and Coleridge with Southey, below Moore, Campbell, Rogers, and Walter Scott, who seemed to him the best of this generation. He regarded Keats' poetry as "a kind of mental masturbation." In general, Byron was convinced that his time was not a high point of English poetry: there are more poets (supposedly) than ever, and proportionately less poetry.

It must be acknowledged that he did not hesitate to include himself in the "heterogeneous mass" of these poets, whose writings were founded, according to him, on a revolutionary but erroneous system which, he said casually, is not worthy.

To this last observation, it is clear that it is impossible to include Byron in a synthesis of romantic notions on poetry. If his work exhibits certain incontestable affinities with that of his contemporaries, in the doctrinal domain he alone was to deny the value of this poetry and of the poetic theory of which it could rely. In fact, Byron, the standard-bearer of European romanticism, admired a neoclassicism which he blithely reproached for having "shamefully deviated" from his practice. The Byronic theory of poetry amounts to a sincere but provocative apology of Alexander Pope, who for the other romantics (and especially Wordsworth) was the scapegoat charged with all the sins committed by the eighteenth century against the spirit of poetry. Pope, in their eyes, was the poetry of reason; it was the inspiration of the most superficial currents which traversed the elegant society; it was a mechanical prosody, an artificial diction, a refinement of no consequence. It was the denial of their creed, which exalted the imagination, placed immediate experience at the basis of poetry, formulated the feeling of the organic, subordinated form to the demands of inspiration, and honored virgin nature. Pope, for Byron, was "the Poet." But, regardless the critics, for the public, his public, Byron remains “the Romantic” and “the Hero”.

Byron and Byronic

Everybody employs the term Byronic and resorts on it to express familiar notions for regular use. Regrettably, this common use of the proper name generates only a fragment disconnected from the truth, and occasionally not even, but an easy shade of it. As for Byronic, the decrease is really meaningless, because the adjective refers exclusively to man and to a single connotation—one of the poet's fantastic types has absorbed his name. But Byron's judgment, writings, and personality as a whole cannot be sufficiently summed up in the figure of an impetuous lover, whose fits of sadness are a facade.

Byron and the Byronic are two different things, though in part intersecting. The Byronic is set up in Byron's works and in those of his large literary descendants. Byron himself can be found in the standard first-hand resources of biography, and particularly in his letters. They bring us within his fascinating field of energy, which was not, as the Byronic typecast might imply, simple anxiety and wildness. It was rigorous mind, and high feelings, intelligence, good sense, and a enthusiasm for truth- in short an exceptional release of intellectual vigor.

Even the meaning of Byronic itself, starts to appear different when it is detached from the vicinity of other course-book truism and restored in its historical background.

By 1812 England and Europe had been trapped in warfare for thirty years. The French Revolution seemed a danger to the surrounding countries: in the same year Childe Harold appeared, Napoleon invaded Russia as he wanted to rule all Europe: in the past 20 years France attacked its neighbors no less than five times. Every country, in addition, had to deal with those of its citizens who clandestinely or explicitly sided with the adversary, convinced by the revolutionary ideas of popular emancipation. Since his adolescence, Byron had a great admiration for Napoleon, and he was not the only one among English people: for 30 years the fight between democrats and reactionaries had contaminated every area of public life and art.

Into the overcharged air of factional conflict, Childe Harold came like a gentle wind from the open ocean. The poem began with departure from the stressed British Isles. The reader was taken far away to the exotic Levant. Putting aside its claustrophobia the European mind could loosen the tension and expand its sympathies without infringe the patriotism or rules.

But in the desire for freedom there was another element which still wanted to emerge, the impulse to action. Byronic melancholy, the romantic spleen of the entire nineteenth-century had its extraction in the suppressed energy. Byronic heroism is its remedy or explicit satisfaction.

But without analyzing the motives of the Byronic inspiration, we cannot fully understand the enormous impact it has on the great writers of 19th century, such as: Goethe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Tennyson. Goethe, for example, was a great admirer of Byron and Byronism, and he made it very explicitly.

And it was Napoleon who inspired one way or another, the literary works of the romantic century. Byron was simply the earliest, or the most victorious among the first authors, to put in verses the feelings of the new hero, the anonymous who puts his life in danger for no gain but glory. The fact that Byron tried to live in a similar manner to his characters, is partially due to his education and social origin, to his trust in the value of liberty. After all, the wind of liberty started to be felt in Europe.

The 19th century's enthusiasm for freedom gave birth to many characters who embodied the free spirit. The Byronic model, owed its extensive livelihood to a constant necessity in the soul of men and the construction of society.

Briefly, Byron should be categorized with those few significant men of nobility who were serious and honest about the aristocratic principles. This kind of men attributed to the notions of "freedom" and "exemplar" the highest meaning contained in them, and i such an extraordinary way that the world could by no means to forget.

In Byron's personal life, the scandal was attached to him on other reason than politics, and it is customary to say that his heroic deaths in Greece, fighting for liberty of the oppressed, compensate by its noble altruism the ignoble decadence of previous years.

Byron would definitely be the last to be offended by our scrutiny. He encouraged it in many ways; he was surprisingly critical with regard of his own person, and if he has given his autobiography to his survivors instead of confronting the society with his confessions, it was only for the reason that he thought that memoirs published while the artist is alive and in full artistic capability convinced everyone the author have to be dead. But Byron is not dead yet, as author or hero. He, of course, had all the traits of fame: brilliance, humor, inventiveness and all the traits of heroism: bravery, superior intellect, self abandon. He was a man in whom merits and strength merged with immorality and weakness in such impressive manner that I feel that it was he the one that the Prince of Denmark (also a Byronic hero) indicated as the prototype of Man, marvel and impossibility of Nature.

As literary theme, the hero, the titan precedes the literature and goes back illo tempore having deep roots in the ancient myths of the humanity. The literary motif of titans is used very frequently, expressing various tendencies and aspirations according to the epoch of their creation. Prometheus Satan, Cain, Hamlet becomes successively characters of great complexity, highlighting the sensitivity and tension not only of a creative individual but also the struggles and the imperatives of an era. Thus, no wonder that titan’s personality was of great literary audience; the figure of hero becomes an essential element in European literary typology of the late eighteenth century and the first half of the next one. It will tempt one by one Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Milton, Byron and Shelley.

Seeking "a key" for an unitary understanding of European romanticism, the American scholar H. Remak reveals it in the romantic duality but also in the constantly renewed aspiration to repair the inner split: "Romanticism is trying to heal the universal rift, is the painful consciousness of dualism accompanied by a desire to solve it by obtaining an organic monism; it is the desire to reconcile two opposite elements, to make the antithesis to be followed by synthesis ".

American researcher notes also novelty of the fundamental romantic unrest as compared with the inner problems of the previous age, the "Enlightenment". From the consciousness of this duality and the desire to abolish it, arise under this interpretation, the great myths created by romanticism: nature, childhood, elementary and primitive, everything that does not lead to primary sources of existence, brings us closer to nature.

It was established, first in the consciousness of the romantics, then in the minds of those who have studied the phenomenon, a romantic archetype, exhibiting intense distinctive manifestations exerted in the spiritual realm and that of everyday life, archetype defined usually in opposition to the archetype of the classic age. In his study "Classicism, Romanticism, Baroque", George Călinescu after affirming the nonexistence of pure artistic phenomena ("Classicism – romanticism are two ideal types, virtually nonexistent in genuine state, perceptible only to analyze through lens"), formulates the traditional contrast classic – romantic, transposed from the aesthetic to the typology: "the classic individual is the utopia … of a perfectly healthy man's body and soul, normal (serving as standard to the others), thus canonical. Romantic individual is the utopia of a human completely abnormal (meaning exceptional), unbalanced and ill, that is with the intellect and sensitivity exacerbated to the maximum, summarizing all the spiritual aspects from beast to genius (…). From the health point of view, the classic hero is "healthy", but with gladiator type health which implies a failure of synapses. The romantic man, as common knowledge, is ailing, infirm, hectic, crazy, leper …

In adapting to existence, classic man looks sensible and intelligible in his acts; romantic man is bizarre, absurd, incomprehensible. (…) In astronomical terms I would say "classic man is Sun, romantic man is Selene. Classic time is noon, romantic time is 12 pm … ". And diet is conclusive: "classic man drink milk, spring water or eat honey and fruit. The romantic man consumed gin, opium or drink water from Lete, because he needs stimulants, painkillers to bear or to forget the inferno of life. "

Roughly, it speaks of a passive, introspective inadequacy, and of an active one exteriorizing itself in the romantic types of titans, demon, i.e. the rebellious; first characterized by excessive morbidity, seeking refuge in a dream or hallucination. All these bring up the problem of ethical exploitation of these attitudes.

In a first version of romantic titanism, which we find in the novel of Jean Paul Richt, Titan (1803), the titanic character, the demonic Roquairol, is a personality frantic and mysterious, embodiment of "Sturn und Drang" titan but also an amoral and cynical person. Byron's Corsair with his dark demonism is considered admirable for his defiant rebellion; Lucifer and Cain of the same Byron affirm the titanic side of their personality through lucid attitudes of denial and Shelley’s Prometheus is pure and free of shadows.

BYRONIC CHARACTERS ANALYSIS

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

The survival of the works of Shakespeare to the erosion of time and history, celebrated as recognition of immortality of true art, is due to a huge amount of countless studies and idealization. Throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Hamlet has been considered the work more meaningful and important of the Romantic era: the conflict between action and contemplation. On one hand the undeniable condensation, in its enigmatic but very eloquent inaction, all the spiritual crisis of an era coming to an end; the other is the symbol, with its private and highly personal reasons, man eternally struggling with the contradictions of morality and with the need to choose every day his actions.

No other drama has analyzed the paradoxes of thought and action with so much depth, but with Hamlet literature acquired clarity and an unprecedented intensity. Many critics have formulated the hypothesis that Shakespeare in Hamlet described his deep emotional experience. At a precise moment in his life author-actor Shakespeare found in the theatrical repertoire the theme and the plot of Hamlet. This meeting between the author and a hero in the throes of mourning for his father's death, betrayal of a woman and a plot belonging to the history and legend together, in which the theme of patricide is joined to that of incest has become the occasion a sublime and mysterious tragedy.

The main purpose of theater is to show on stage the story of the protagonists’ actions. With Shakespeare we have a reversal of the genre’s canons that exploits the resources of dramatic action and replace them with dramatic contrast of priceless inaction. Hamlet is full of narratives of events; the action on stage is all built on words. But next to the outward drama he develops another one – deep, intimate, flowing in silence because there is nothing that can express what is inside it. This is the paradox encountered by Shakespeare, reciting what surpasses the possibility of representation: the psychic pain. The tragedy is divided in two parts, one is the same tragedy, his story, words, words, words, the other is the rest, silence, what is not told in the drama, what is concealed from Hamlet.

The silence will try to unearth the secret; the theatrical language will be awarded with primacy as it is the only one which can tell us what it cannot show. Inaction of the prince is no longer regarded as a manifestation of a psychological weakness but will find itself closely linked to the discovery of the Oedipus complex. According Freud, Hamlet is nothing but the representation of a variant of the Oedipus complex. The tragedy becomes a symbolic structure to be discovered, its great success is to include the psychic space in the scene limits. The theater becomes a symbolic matrix that reflects our own mind. Hamlet is not a man, but a tragic character, the result of a fantasy. The purpose of the fantasy beings is to make us believe in their existence, the theater even more than elsewhere, since their representation is embodied in the actors. If it were not so they would not raise in us so many emotions, so many thoughts, so many hopes to perceive through them our own mystery.

Hamlet is first of all the tragedy of cosmic reconciliation, commissioned by the ghost of a king. But, as in the quest for the Grail, the character of the son of the assassinated father avenging him multiplies its transformations. The accidental killing of Polonius unleashes an ironic tragedy of blood that leads to madness Ophelia and Laertes. It’s just one of the elements of the story of Hamlet, trapped in the chaos of his own conscience, between a ghost that demands blood as a source of peace for his soul and the ethical and metaphysical questions of an intellectual thought fascinated by the punishment.

After the old Hamlet killed old Fortinbras, "there is something rotten in Denmark", as in London after the conspiracy of Essex against Elizabeth. Since Claudius has killed his own brother with lewd complicity of Queen Gertrude, there is always someone hidden behind the curtains of Elsinore; courtiers, reduced to the status of agents of power, cannot survive with that self-censorship or the mask of stupidity. Crushed by fear, every man is at the mercy of others. A bait was needed to lure Hamlet into the trap, because he has become an accomplice of a criminal and power usurper, Ofelia is sacrificed to sex sickness that haunts Hamlet after the revelation of maternal crime … The world of corruption opens the door to death in a distorted society in which the friendship of Horace, humanist like Hamlet, is not enough to offset the servility of silly courtiers. The father's murder is represented again as a psychodrama by actors hired by Hamlet; destroyed by the tension between the role of informer and the loving woman she would like to remain, shattered by the loss of love, Ophelia is obsessed with death in the choruses of her madness before drowning under the willows.

Death is everywhere, the natural end of life for the indifferent gravediggers, and becomes the philosophical Hamlet's question in front of the skull of poor Yorick, buffoon of his childhood. Murder asks for murder: Claudio has to kill his nephew to keep the throne, Hamlet has to kill his uncle to avenge his father. Paralyzed by the focus of his spirit on alienating degeneration of a society initiated to death through the chaos, no more intellectual goal, he no longer sees nothing certain in life and in death. Moralist conscious in an unconscious world, disgust arises in himself impulses that he condemns in others, he is attracted by the action despite the fear of not being able to clarify the motives, nor control the consequences, neither knows if the evil is causing enough sickness to act; the renunciation to kill Claudius while in prayer, the wish to send him directly to hell by surprising him in a state of sin, is not only looking for a better revenge, is also hesitation of an intellectual who is afraid to destroy the authenticity of a murder, his rejection of evil.

The discovery of the Claudius’ treachery in sending him to death in England and the despair that comes from the death of Ophelia, which he feels responsible, breaks the last resistance in holding him back from acting as Prince Hamlet: we must purify the social order with death of the usurper, the truth must to come to light because the mutual forgiveness of the dying clears the way of Fortinbras, whose political virginity makes him worthy of the wedding with Denmark.

Shelley’s Prometheus

This section focuses on Prometheus Unbound, lyrical drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Titan who has stolen the fire from Gods for the blessing of mortals and who fascinated many classical authors like Cicero and Aeschylus, and here remodeled as most wise hero, a martyr of freedom and educator, who struggle for human progress against all sort of tyranny through nonviolence and forgiveness.

The story is presented in an enchanted atmosphere, with a personified ideal Nature and other characters, according to the romantic inspiration of the poet; in Shelley's moral fable, light and music recur as symbols of Happiness, Love and Hope, which in the end will prevail on opposite principles, if the mankind wants that. Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals weak and disadvantaged, daring to defy Zeus and consequently reversing the fragile balance of power, has fascinated and seduced also the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, born in Sussex in 1792 and died in the sea at Lerici in 1822. In 1820 (after almost two years of composition) is in fact published the manuscript of Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama in four acts, intended for reading an small audience of connoisseurs.

The title emphasizes clearly the solid classical culture of the Sussex poet, also confirmed by other works, recalling the Promethean trilogy of Aeschylus. Shelley has not created a simple attempt of the story of the Greek tragedian, but Prometheus has developed a unique, original and singular figure, by varying the classic plot. Unlike the Greek author, the poet of Sussex does not reconcile the two antagonists par excellence, Zeus and Prometheus, because such a solution would have been too weak, obvious and anticipated, overshadowing the long suffering and endurance of the brave protagonist. During his torture, Prometheus is supported by the Earth and the elements of nature, suffering and despairing in symbiosis with him.

Unlike the Titan of Aeschylus, Shelley’s Prometheus is no longer the proud hero, rebellious to the bitter end, but a titan grief-stricken, whom the long period of suffering has made mature and wiser, who abandoned violent impulses and vengeful whish. His beloved wife Asia, helped by the Oceanide Panteia, starts her journey for the liberation of Titan. In the cave of Demogorgon, Asia learns the origin of the world and evil, and discovers that it's time for the long-awaited release of her beloved.

Same time, in heaven Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon, while celebrating with the cupbearer Ganymede and others his violent and ruthless domination of the world. Jupiter falls into the abyss and finally Prometheus is released by Hercules, the two lovers are reunited and they transferred in a cave surrounded by unspoiled nature, cheered by the songs of birds and the buzzing of bees, next to an old temple in honor of Prometheus, inaugurating a new order in the world. First, the author, through the mythological story of Prometheus, implicitly tells a love story with a happy ending, the one between the Titan and the beloved consort Asia. Shelley paints a hero proud and determined in his opposition to Jupiter, but at the same time free from any vindictive intent. On the other hand Asia is transformed into pure light, illuminating the entire world in the universal good, in all its meanings of Peace, Justice, Freedom and Hope .

So far the characters are all representatives of classical mythology. The real innovation of Shelley is manifested in a sublime way in the selection of unusual and somewhat original extras that give the drama a dreamy atmosphere, almost magical and enchanted. The theme of Prometheus in the European literature emphasizes the moral interest of the fable and defines Prometheus as the symbol of the highest moral and intellectual perfection, driven by the most pure and true motives to the best and noblest purposes.

To understand the ultimate significance of Shelley’s work, the plot should be viewed in a moral light that is the background of the struggle between evil, personified by Jupiter, and the good, expressed in the figure of Prometheus. This Manichean dualism floods the entire work and, with the fall of Jupiter into the abyss and the consequent liberation of Titan, the poet of the Sussex wants to communicate the defeat of injustice, war, ignorance (manifestations of evil) and the triumph love, justice, peace and knowledge (expressions of good). Shelley, through suggestive similarities, proclaims the triumph of love, guidance of the world and the human soul through the ocean of passions and impulses not always positive.

A hymn to freedom, Prometheus Unbound is a veritable hymn to freedom: next to the macro-theme of the struggle between Good and Evil, outlining the conflict between the despotic power represented by Zeus and the exaltation of freedom propounded and established by Prometheus. Jupiter is most often labeled a cruel king, but also as a tyrant. Shelley has a totally negative view of power, synonymous with corruption, violence, injustice, war, and those who exercise it. In this regard, through the Furies in the first act, the poet says that those who have the task of governing are not up to standard, or the power, the goodness, wisdom and love, which are essential for the proper functioning of one state.

Living in a history marked by great ideals, but followed by massacres, despotism, corruption, hatred and blood, the only possible solution is first the fight and then the freedom. In this context it explains the dethronement of Jupiter and the victory of Prometheus, which brings with it the abolition of thrones, altars, prisons and courts, symbols of political powers, religious and legal. Prometheus does not become the new king; instead he retreats to a cave in a pleasant forest. Rejection of any exercise of power and absolute freedom: these are the watchwords for Prometheus, so for Shelley, in order to create a new golden age, in which "govern" only peace, social equality and justice.

Christological vision of Shelley’s Prometheus brings to the reader's mind many aspects that refer to the teaching of Jesus Christ and to the infamous punishment of crucifixion he suffered. Titan, nailed to a desolate cliff of Caucasus, daily tortured by the eagle, torn by shocks of earthquakes that pierce the nail wounds, extenuated, abandons his pride and converts, by revoking the curse pronounced against Zeus at the time of sentencing. Shelley takes distance from the proud and impulsive Aeschylus’ Prometheus, although not without his hero’s determination and inflexible opposition to the cruel god. The Titan of Shelley and a rebel Satan as the hero of Milton's Paradise Lost, both oppose to God, but unlike the latter he is devoid of envy, of revenge, of power thirst; and this very important divergence allows Prometheus victory. At this point the reader may infer a further parallel between the fate of Satan and that of Jupiter: both fall in the darkness of evil, precisely because they are vindictive, evil and blinded by power. The figure of Christ is superimposed on the Titan in a clear manner in the first act when the Furies exclaim: “Drops of bloody agony flow/From his white and quivering bow/Grant a little respite now” [Prometheus Unbound: I, 564-566:] – which recall the image of the thorns crown that Jesus wears on the day of his crucifixion). The christen image is completed by Pantea, assisting in horror, along with her sister, to the torture of the Titan: "a youth/ With patient looks nailed to a crucifix" [Prometheus Unbound: I, 584-585] Shelley sees in the work and in the destiny of Prometheus a Christ forward the Christ. Shelley gives its own hero the character of the founder of Christianity, makes him a martyr, who is able to give up resentment and hatred against his persecutor in the name of forgiveness and mercy, these weapons against evil. “The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan ; and Prometheus is, …, 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 and 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.”

The author's implicit message English author is: the man can find complete fulfillment, expressing his interiority and his ego creating works of art, music, and scientific discoveries, or giving his unconditional love to the people and letting themselves be loved. Only by implementing all this man can experience true freedom and perhaps only viable.

Milton’s Satan

“Milton’s poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonors his conquest in the victor. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judge to be a violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil.”

There are many reasons why Paradise Lost is one of the preeminent works of English literature, the most considered and analyzed, but it is one in particular: the representation, complex and contradictory of Satan, who, with the work of Milton, becomes the figure of the rebel par excellence. The ambivalence of Satan: hero or villain?

“[Milton] was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” These words of William Blake, included in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (written between 1790 and 1793), make clear the point of no return in literature, which obviously refers to the way of representing and understanding Satan.

The readers and interpreters of the new millennium find themselves, in the attempt to interpret Satan’s figure, before a dilemma that three centuries of critical interpretations have not entirely solved: Milton's Satan is a hero or a villain? There are many doubts about the purpose of the author, who probably intended to condemn the actions of the fallen Angel: the main reason of the Paradise Lost, incipit already explained, is to justify in the eyes of men the work of God, that is, show that the fall of Adam and Eve is part of its providential plan. Why then create such a complex negative figure for which readers sympathize so easily? Already Dryden, contemporary of Milton and first critic of his work, observed this contradiction, however, reducing it to a defect of form as if an author of Milton's stature had been able to get carried away and Satan was even out of control of his pen.

Paradise Lost is a drama between epic and tragedy. The design of the poem is long and complex. It was initially conceived as a tragedy.

As we mentioned above, there are the epic hero characteristics in Satan. Following his and others rebellious angels fall, Satan shows courage, majesty, stoicism, invincibility of the spirit: the defeat has not bent his pride, as a matter of fact in his famous speech indulges himself to a veritable megalomania:

“… Here at least

We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reigh secure; and, in my choice,

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

(P.L. Book I, p.10)

But we must distinguish between representation and function within the text, that is, between what appears and what it is: the fact that Satan encompasses within himself the elements of an epic hero does not mean that Milton wanted to enhance him. Milton does not compare Satan with the heroes of the past to which the situations seem to place him (Achilles, Aeneas); in the course of poem he gradually degenerates until becomes the infernal and creeping Serpent that pushed Adam and Eve to sin. Also it is not certain that Milton was determined about the values ​​of which the epic hero is the bearer. His values, as a fervent Puritan he was, are rather incarnated in Adam and Eve before the fall: humility, gentleness, patience, temperance, solidarity, conjugal love, work; that means the opposite of the qualities personified by the romantic titan Satan.

Milton has not only elevated Satan to epic hero, but also demonized the aristocratic values ​​of which the Devil is the bearer. Blake Satan is also a tragic character, similar to the villain of Shakespeare and first of all to Macbeth, the tragedy supremely admired by Milton. In Macbeth there is a reference to Lucifer: "Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell." There seems to be a circularity in this: Shakespeare thought to Lucifer to create the figure of Macbeth and Macbeth is among the sources for the Milton’s Satan.

What makes Satan a tragic character is the presence of a deficiency inherent to his person: pride, the cause of his fall, and of which he cannot possibly escape, but Satan is represented in a heroic conduct. Milton’s direct suggestion and the general atmosphere in the scenes concerning Satan place him in a heroic light. As critics observed, this helps to promote Satan’s decadence; his disobedience of God becomes a political fight against a tyrant; his detestation a response to offended value; and his endeavor to regain Heaven an epic mission. It is almost generally accepted that Satan is, eventually, ethically vicious; the interest develops from the interference between Satan’s morality and his mythical heroism.

Regardless of the heroic representation of Satan, his actions and reasons are still immoral. In the framework of the plot, which covers the humans’ foundation, Satan brings sin and mortality to the world, he is the cause of man’s fall, and he engages the perpetual battle with God. What it is to be understood from this discrepancy is that Milton’s Paradise Lost awards heroic illustration of a wicked spirit. In any case, regardless Milton’s writing plan and intention, Satan’s immorality is symbiotic with his heroic representation. It is difficult to admire Satan’s heroism, as the reader understands that the fall of Adam and Eve represents the fall of the humanity. Satan’s war with God is not a struggle for freedom but a battle for power.

Byron’s Manfred

Manfred is a classic Byronic hero living in isolation in castle in the Swiss Alps. Even though he feels superior to people and nature he cannot find peace. Bearing the burden of an untold guilt he only whishes to forget, but his spells and knowledge cannot deliver oblivion. He is cursed to find liberation only in death, but he is condemned to live and carry his guilt. No atonement for Manfred.

Manfred is eager to die, so he attempts to throw himself off a cliff, but a hunter who incidentally was passing by saves Manfred. He confesses to the hunter that he loved Astarte, he was involved with her in an inadequate manner, implying that it was an incestuous involvement which caused the death of Astarte.

Manfred refuses to abandon his freedom, free will and spirit in order to find peace in the splendid nature, as the Witch of Mountains requested him. Entering the Arimanes’ magic land, he gets to see Astarte’s ghost who tells him that his turmoil will soon be ended, but she does not grant him explicitly her forgiveness. As returned to his castle, he receives the visit of a priest. But religion does not comfort him, cannot bring him peace. A demon attacks Manfred, wounds him, and finally Manfred finds his peace in death.

Manfred profounder character than other Byron’s preceding hero; Childe Harold does not strike the reader through his philosophy, or theology of dualism, nor as a pagan worshiper of nature, and the other protagonists of Byron are not tormented by the problems which have possessed Manfred; though The Giaour has the coldness and resentment to Christianity as Manfred.

Byron borrowed the radical idea that Man can course himself without assistance of the Evil from Thomas Taylor. George Sand noted that Manfred is “… Faust liberated from the odious company of Mephistopheles”.

It is the supremacy Manfred demonstrates over the mystical power he comes across which makes him anxious. He is remains unmoved by the enticement of all physical or mythological beings and is self-consumptive entirely on his personal conditions.

Manfred is a lonely man, to a certain extent by his own choice, in part by awareness his own superiority on the rest of the men, in part by the heaviness of his sin and misery. He is a man of obscurity and sin, and related to this sin is the guilt:

“The innate tortures of that deep despair,

Which is remorse without the fear of hell”

[Manfred: III, 83-84]

Not only George Sand noted the similarity between Goethe’s Faust and Byron’s Manfred. Goethe, himself, found the right tone and underlined the originality of the English writer: “This strange and gifted poet has completely assimilated my Faust and derived the strangest nourishment from it for his hypochondria. He has used all the motifs in his own way, so that none remains quite the same, and for that reason alone I cannot sufficiently admire his mind. […]He is a great talent, a born talent, and I never saw the true poetical power greater in any man than in him. In the apprehension of external objects, and a clear penetration into past situations, he is quite as great as Shakespeare.”

In his absolute admiration for Byron, Nietzche assessed that Manfred is greater than Goethe’s Faust because he sets for himself a moral code beyond the inherited standards of good and wrong.

Referring to Byron’s Manfred Nicolae Iorga stated: “… in his philosophy on the painful limitation of the human being passed Shakespeare’s great blow, to whom Byron resembled so much any time he imitated him, with or without intention.”

The knowledge inspired to Manfred, as object of debate in his nocturne dialog, a feeling of pessimism and discontent. The science and the philosophy do not satisfy him because they offer evasive answers to the capital questions. The energy of the spirit that alienates him of human character turns the titan into a romantic superior genius in his isolation. Alienation is the result of either failure to adapt implying an attitude of protest and the polemical demon or the consciousness of superiority and moral awareness. Titanic strength he acquired through a speculative path is the result of his own effort of knowledge. Dramatic development in the case of Manfred is grafted on a strong spiritual conflict generated by his sentimental aberration, that the revolt of this "Prometheus manqué" is only apparently the fundamental texture, since Byron closes in it a personal strict significance. The temptation of suicide sprung from gnosiological skepticism (impossibility of identification with the infinite), practice of magic, exorcism all are complemented by a lucid consciousness. Manfred loses himself in his own fantasies having the same philosophy as Hamlet on the existential mystery, time and death. Finally, the mystery of death is revealed as a remedy of the inaccessible oblivion. The power he holds is the result of a titanic effort of knowledge.

If Byron's proud heroes in epics affirm a constructive ideal and become champions in the struggle for freedom and social justice, Manfred, speculative and nihilistic spirit, does not have ideals. The protagonists of the poems become victims of their engagement in life understood as an active principle, while Manfred is the intrinsic victim of his inner fantastic. The disintegration of devitalized individualism is the consequence of romantic isolation from humans, heightened by the consciousness of futility of things. Life reduced to the own ego is not justified, the refuge within the inner fantasy means death. Byronic character is the symbol of the romantic individuality rather than that of all humanity.

CHAPTER II – FEATURES OF SATANIC AND BYRONIC HEROS

The Satanic feature of the Byronic Hero is instituted in every Byron’s unique hero. Byronic heroes have titanic stature; they are solitary and exiled, egocentric, some of them even revolutionary. They express the position of the authors toward the society they live in. Milton’s superb Satan from Paradise Lost and Napoleon Bonaparte’s heroic rise and fall, are the two important sources of inspiration for Byron in creating his proud hero with his imperfect greatness and aspiration for control.

Escaping and denying the conventions of society, Byronic join notorious characters such as Lucifer and Cain in their endless damnation. The damnation is a major theme in the literary works of romanticism and the main theme of the Byronic heroes. The Byronic hero is perceived as the manifestation of sophisticated male sexuality, angry, dominant, “experienced, simultaneously brutal and seductive, devilish enough to overwhelm the body and yet enough of a fallen angel to charm the soul”.

The Norton Anthology affirms that Byronic hero borrowed from Milton’s Satan the rebellious temperament and pride. I would add that he borrowed from Hamlet the high intellectual quality. It is well known that Byron had an obsessive admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon with his exciting greatness and authority captivated Lord Byron since his adolescence. As Napoleon leaves France for his first exile to Elba, Byron wrote “Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte” followed, after Waterloo battle, by “Farwell to France”. Byron draws a parallel between Napoleon’s fall and the fall of Milton’s archangel – Satan. Satan’s disobedience, independence and love of individual freedom are clear in the Byronic hero.

Milton’s Satan opposes to the authoritarian God, starting the revolt with his faction against the faithful angels. The son of God all alone crushes Satan’s armies and throws out them from heaven. Satan opposed the highest authority and loses the battle, yet the revenge is his: tempting Eve to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is a victory over God’s creation. Milton’s Satan has Byronic traits as aversion for status and benefits and the wish to challenge the authority. Satan becomes attractive because of his tumultuous energy, his tenacious confidence in his capabilities and his devious and brilliant mind.

Byronic hero is titanic, inspiring fear and admiration; he is mysterious, having dark secrets and dangerous. Byron’s heroes are gigantic and superhuman, struggling desperately with the pitiless world of man but bearing a deep open wound of an unspecified inner guiltiness that produces him more bitterness than the cruel world does. The Byronic hero has certainly many dark, satanic traits. With his intellectual power and self-confidence the Byronic hero is superior to life itself. He also has a higher sensibility and awareness than ordinary people. These astonishing abilities compel the Byronic hero to be overconfident, peculiarly insightful, and extremely aware of himself.

The Byronic hero is a multifaceted character with many qualities and many imperfections. The character is attractive, fascinating, egocentric, sensitive, mysterious, cunning, bright, temperamental and insolent toward society and its institutions; Hamlet, Satan, Manfred have several traits like these.

They all are self-absorbed; some of them have been proscribed or expatriated. “The Byronic hero as a wanderer has no homeland and searching in passionate torment he longs to be placed within a context that fits”. The Byronic hero is always damned some manner, he has not the feeling that he belongs to some place and no place is home for him.

The Byronic hero is sublime and damned. Hamlet’s eagerness for revenge, his Oedipus complex signs his damnation. Is it not for his cynical and dark side that Hamlet, one of the most successful characters in Shakespeare, remained in the cultural memory for centuries? This is because no one can avoid identifying with him: anticipating the researches of Freud, Hamlet confronts us for the first time with individual self-consciousness. What historians call Romanticism was born here, with this hero, even though it took a century before Nietzsche said that Hamlet possessed “the true knowledge, an 'intuition of 'terrible reality ', which is the 'abyss between earthly reality and the consciousness in continuous aspiration to something that is ‘over’.” The Shakespearean hero has inspired all later writers: from Milton to Goethe, Lord Byron, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett.

The romantic Byronic hero, then, is the voice of that single common model for an entire generation of intellectuals, torn by a deep and constant pain of living.

Satan’s eagerness for personal recognition and power, his rebellion and heroism is sublime. But his damnation comes with his rebellion. It seems that the Universe is too small for two almighty Gods. Manfred constantly confront all authority forms as well as magical spirits. In his loneliness, Manfred is more powerful than any other human being but this very power is his curse.

Manfred is portrayed as self-centered and his torment in seeking atonement for his unspoken sin creates the feeling that Manfred is in love with his ordeal. Manfred’s sin is never in the center of the drama as the spotlight is on his deep feeling of guilt, repentance and desolation. Manfred is not involved in the exterior world as his fate is to never resolute the inner conflict and never atone.

The Byronic hero is the leader of the unfortunates and he stands up for individual freedom with rebelliousness for repressive authority. Milton’s Satan leaded Byron to embrace this trait for his Manfred character and indisputably this is a major trait of Byronic hero regardless the writer.

Romanticism is a worldview centered on the fundamental value of the feeling. The great theme of romantic literature: the defeat and death of the hero unable to adapt to an order of which eludes meaning and that, in any case, would require giving up the most sacred principles of consciousness. The Byronic hero's unhappiness always derives from a disharmony and a disproportion between the ideal and the real, between the absolute and the contingent: the ego refuses, in its quest for ideal and absolute, to be reduced by the prison of the average reality.

BYRONIC FEELINGS

The inadequacy of man towards the world

Hegel observed that the typical “romantic spirit nature is the radical inadequacy of man to the world.” The Byronic hero’s felt unhappy when the consciousness of the infinite ego painfully occurs and transcends, often tragically, the limits of reality. In the clash between the huge ego embodied in a really insignificant space and in an insignificant time, without outbursts – and a tumultuous surge of feelings, the Byronic hero, once fallen, has also the cruel experience of the impossibility to reconcile his ideals with the old positive beliefs of Christianity that still constitute the ultimate faith.

The romantic temper arises, therefore, a complex crisis of certainties: first of all, the proud claim of Enlightenment that the man can solve every problem with reason, after having demolished on earth and in heaven dogmas, prejudices ancient and recent superstitions. The failure of the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity of the French Revolution in the sea of ​​blood had increased in the most sensitive minds even in the masses a widespread feeling of weariness and disappointment, after so many wars.

The sense of nature

The dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment mentality characterizes the romanticism which focuses on the fundamental value of the feeling. The feeling, however, especially in the English romantics’ works, is seen as an alternative to the abstract faculty of the intellect, capable of only superficially to organize experience according to the dictates of physics and materialism. In particular, the nature is felt by English romantics no longer as an abstract set of mechanical laws, but rather as a living reality, animated, dynamic. The key issue is, I think, the relationship between the self – and nature, characterized by two basic attitudes:

if nature is seen as a metaphor of the spirit or God himself, protective living reality pacifying or ecstatic culmination of a religious tension in the life of the universe and individual, an euphoric and optimistic feeling will prevail as in Prometheus Unbound;

if nature is felt as an indifferent or even hostile force, shall result in a pessimistic attitude, the cosmic pain of Satan or Manfred.

The deep meaning of nature for Byronic hero is often symbolic, beyond the realistic description of the stanzas. In other words, the nature is always associated with a complex emotional and psychological situation of the Byronic hero, often troubled and dramatic.

The inadequacy of the Byronic hero in the world, the tension never definitely solved, the intolerance of the limits are at the root of that particular feeling of Byronic hero, the yearning, nostalgia, anguish, a divided self which tends constantly to escape to something else (otherness, elsewhere, often in an inseparable confusion). The flight in time and space is the most characteristic expression this neurotic melancholia, also the throwback steeped in nostalgia, childhood memory or deluded youth, longing for what has been and is no more. Equally the distant countries, the beautiful islands, the highest mountains, the East and Greece are attractive precisely because they are utopian places of dream.

Therefore, the Byronic hero is irrevocably charmed by the world of classic – Paradise myth of Milton and Shelley, which stains the soul of nostalgia to a world of beauty that lives only in the memory, tragically outdated. Everything in the distance becomes romantic: distant mountains, distant men, distant events, everything becomes Byronic. The indefinite, the remembrance, the Shakespearean singular theory of double vision are particular for the Byronic temper, expressions that warns against the insufficiency of the present; Byronic hero tend to escape into another reality, memorial, fantastic, dreamlike or metaphysical. The escape into space can sometimes not be enough for Byronic spirit, which will then, tend to escape from the space in the interiority of the infinite consciousness, or in the absolute.

Satan or Byronic hero reveals his depths such as spiritual restlessness, yearning without object, and therefore evil desire. This search for the endless desire that characterizes the psychology of Byronic hero can only enhance the hypersensitivity to pain and torn the spirit, in case of tension occurrence, in an intimate conflict often figured in the character of Hamlet. The escape from reality because of the mind which cannot control the impulse exacerbates the introspection. The exploration of the other self of the hero falls into the unconscious, into something that is beyond reason.

“Le mal du siècle” is a kind of subtle spiritual sickness, indistinct anxiety, pushing the loneliness, the sense of futility and emptiness: the inner state is not comforted by nature, on the contrary feeds even more painful illusions like in Manfred case.

Between the terror of French revolution and the fall of Napoleon, the Byronic hero expresses the restlessness of a generation living in an age of general crisis, not just politics. A beautiful soul is necessarily an unhappy consciousness because nothing can satisfy it completely.

Romantic love

Love is certainly one of the inevitable experiences of the Byronic hero who lives on the momentum of a spiritual feeling, capable of transcending the closed banality and monotony of reality. Romantic literature pushes the passion in often tragically unsolvable conflicts triggered by the force of nature which is love, pure and innocent force (see Prometheus Unbound) in contrast to the hypocritical social conventions. It must not, however, believe that love is only for the romantic sublimation of disembodied spirits; despite the idealizing charge, it tends to a fullness of feeling which does not exclude the sensual and erotic dimension, as shown in the great narrative line of Hamlet or Manfred. In the psychology of Byronic hero, romantic love is associated frequently to mind, and therefore full of sadness and unhappiness; often death is his inescapable repercussion, symbiotic and for that reason tragic.

The metaphysical failure of Byronic hero, that is, the sense of the inadequacy of the ideal love to the reality, reveals his limitations; he is overwhelmed by the precariousness of time and illusions and his love lives only in the eternity of poetic myth.

Death

All the above explains, at least in part, the enormous importance that the death has in the romantic/Byronic spirituality; for the unhappy consciousness life is the beginning of death. Life exists for the sake of death.

The pain of living invokes the supreme respite of the tomb; but at the same time, the suffering ennobles, distinguishes the Byronic hero by the common man, redeems. Stoic in line early pre-Romanticism, through death the Byronic hero expresses the end of the tragic dispute, of the transitory, of the limitation and reaffirms the proud and free titanic ego that refuses the mediocrity of life. Death liberates him from the constraining space and time, is the gate to unlimited space and time, to infinite, to myth.

The cult of the ego: titanism and suffering

At the heart of romantic spirituality is always the supreme ego value, the cult went as far as to narcissism of genial personality, rebel, heroic, on bad terms with any rule or constraint that somehow limits him, according to the model propagated by Sturm und Drang that will mature in Byronism and generally in the so-called titanism or Prometheanism: attitudes which, in various forms, enhance the position of the individualistic ego in its perpetual struggle against society or fate, think of wandering exile or opposed by the gods. Titanism corresponds to the attitude antithetical and complementary of suffering, of inner withdrawal, the lonely seclusion (away from mediocrity): a manifestation of Byronic psychology which is already delineated in the charm of melancholy to which the Byronic hero is so egotistical attached.

The value of the person

Another great theme of Byronism is the enhancement of the autonomous and creative personality, freed from external constraints of society, conventions and traditional norms, Promethean and titanic rebel according to the frantic style of the Sturm und Drang, however supremely free, holding to a dream of fullness and happiness unachievable within the life time.

The infinite and the absolute energy, implicit in the moral idealism, enriches the Byronic psychology with a very wide range of feelings, from the thrill of joy and the dark despair of pain and boredom, the euphoria of the great gestures and frightful emptiness of apathy, the intense emotions of love and the ever-present thought of death. The uniqueness of this sublime hero originates from the theory of genius, man – force of nature, who is implicitly a superman. The centrality of the ego leads to the direct confession, the autobiography, and the intimate diary. Here it acts another great myth of the century: the sincerity, the presentation of the hero in all its hidden recesses, the exceptional secret of his feelings, even sadistic pleasures of inner exposure, overcoming any hypocrisy.

The noble of the Alps, Manfred embodies all the mythical and damned attributes: guilty, yes, but aware of his human greatness despite his mortal and miserable limits.

Manfred looks cold and proud, but in fact he is not; disenchanted and disillusioned, he does not look for the power and the pleasure, he only wants oblivion. Manfred is the master of the elements, subdued after years of study of the occult and prohibited techniques, master of that “magical” power, a symbol of a higher susceptibility of the soul and of his greater attention to the mystery of existence.

The only evidence of Manfred’s remaining humanity; his only and last unit of measurement is the same pain, caused by a sin that never explained. Lord of a glorious aristocratic lineage seated in the Alps, Manfred appears in the plot at midnight, evoking through his magical powers the ancient spirits of nature: the primitive forces of reality are revealed in all their disclosure before this wizard of great power by offering their invaluable services, yet remaining even more astonished before the request of their new master, who does not ask for domination over the nations but death without memories, endless forgetfulness which according to him should give liberation from that guilt and from the implacable punishment that condemns him to a life devoid of meaning. But nature is impotent because, symbolically, everything is life and the desire of Manfred comes from a soul's intellectual needs, beyond the capabilities of these creatures. The spirits invoked are limited in their magnificence to be slaves themselves to the imperfect condition of creatures and not being the creators.

The incapacity of these prodigies forces the noble lord to give in to despair, ignoring the wise counsel of those who loves him, appealing to the unnatural order to receive answers; here the talent becomes innovation and power: Manfred, in his consciousness to be life and soul and infinity (if only in a small spark of eternity), not only evokes these spirits but with anger at those superb and austere powers, claims his place among them, asserting their soul equality, achieved by years of effort.

In the depressive madness of his own suffering, he arrives in front of Ahriman, a representation of the mythological Satan, the archetype of the spirit of evil, corruption, domination, arrogance and vain ostentation of power. But Manfred realizes that even Ahriman can nothing: he is illusion, fog and the lie of the senses and of the virtues; can show the past, the sins and, like any self-respecting devil, knows no remedy for the pain and recklessness that is in the hearts of men. But now the curse is fulfilled: Manfred refuses to bow to the Lord of deception. Overwhelmed by Promethean power, he waits for the demon hordes; but he refuses to kneel and follow them, thus rejecting his fate. He rejects the very idea of ​​fate eliminating the determination, the passive existence, apparently overwhelmed by a superior power. So death comes, exorcising his personal inner demons, as the unique path to atonement.

According to Goethe, romanticism represents a principle of illness. In the light of modern psychology, gains a new meaning and a new confirmation. Romanticism can be described as sickly, if it is seen only one of the sides of a complex situation of tensions and conflicts, if it takes into account only one factor of the historical dialectic, and if this exaggerated reaction betrays a lack of spiritual balance. Some examples of romantic unrealism and delusion are the flight to the past and the future, to the Utopia. "Le mal du siécle", the existential anguish, can be solved in a melancholic whisper or give rise to shouts which are heartbreaking, both belonging to rebellious people who, confronted with human impotence toward the fate, express themselves through sarcasm.

This aesthetic of terror is one of the discoveries of romanticism in general and of Byronism in particular. Man, instead of worshiping the Creator, confronts Him, rebels against the Creator, against the established order and angrily emphasizes the imperfection and misery of the created and exalts the self in an act of pride and challenge. This challenge of the Creator is qualified as Satanism which embraces an ideal of conscientious civic and human moral. Satanism has aesthetic consequences of the very highest order; by conceiving creation as imperfect, the ideal of beauty is replaced by that of expressiveness.

The alienation

Byronic hero is a being of infinite potential but at the same time is an alien being to society, a rebel against established forms of thought, both political and artistic. The Byronic hero sees himself isolated from society. Such marginality is expressed literally in the origins of the Hero, in the anger and hostility directed to the representatives of power and authority, in the air of mystery that inevitably obscures his true identity. The manifestation of this separation from society can also be expressed through images that represent physically the alienation. The Byronic hero is exiled on a mountain, chained to a rock, isolated in his castle, etc.

The fatality

The Byronic vision of the world demanded a hero oppressed by adverse destiny, condemned to divine wrath without hope of escape or salvation.

The confrontation

Rebellion and defiance are expressed not only in the personal attitude of the Byronic hero against the emotional and social tyranny but also in his political attitude. The combination of the inner movement and his actions will become clearer on an even wider plane, the cosmic plane. The first thing the romantic hero has to do is fight against emotional restrictions raised by the closest persons.

The theme of rejection

The recurrent hesitation between life / death, love / hate, light / darkness, angel / devil, God / Satan, heaven / hell, salvation / condemnation results in an emotional imbalance and leaves that residue of ontological despair that everyone recognize in the Byronic hero.

The impossible love

However the Byronic hero can also be devilish, love in illusion, light in darkness, life in death. The expected union of lovers never takes place (except for Prometheus happily reunited with his wife); always preclude death. When this happens, images that infuse the hero with devilish character are frequent. Love is not the final answer for the Byronic hero; woman represents only one cause of their torment, never THE CAUSE. In the pursuit of the ideal world and the absolute, love is left behind, because love belongs to the real, constraining world. Byronic hero only loves the idea of love, a pure abstraction that causes pain and ordeal for the women. Ophelia’s tragic death fills Hamlet soul with sadness though it is not clear if he ever loved her; Astarte’s death causes Manfred everlasting remorse and guilt, but his final goal is not the reunion (even in death) with her, but his absolute and infinite freedom in the infinite Universe.

THE CONCEPT OF SUBLIME: SATAN AND BYRONIC HERO

The sublime is a literary and philosophical notion which inspires the greatest geniuses and it is not surprising to find it in its two main forms, the sublime of Evil and the sublime of the Good, in the works of novelists and poets who have aroused recognition or controversy. Both Satan and Byronic hero embody the notion of sublime. Schopenhauer clarified the concept of Sublime by some traits, out of which I selected the following:

Sublime – Tumultuous nature

Full Sense of Sublime – Overwhelming tumultuous nature

Fullest Sense of Sublime – Infinity of the Universe as time and space

It is easy to see that the above traits can be detected in Byronic hero through the following:

Astonishment

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is entirely filled with the observed object so it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it. The Byronic hero is fully filled with the greatness of his own ego.

Darkness

To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems to be necessary, because a great deal of apprehension vanishes when we are able to see the full extent of any danger. Darkness is more sublime than light.

Power

The concept of Sublime includes, besides the idea of danger, also the idea of power. Strength, violence, pain and terror are therefore ideas which occupy the mind together. Wild animals are sublimes due to their power; Satan and Byronic heroes are infused with almost absolute power.

Privations

All general privations are great, because they all are terrible: emptiness, darkness, solitude and silence.

Dimensions

Again, vastness, or greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime; and of the three measures of extension, length strikes us least, and height is less grand than depth. The effects of a rugged, broken surface are stronger than those of a polished one. The nature in romanticism is always immense and overwhelming: rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death; a universe of death.

Physical reaction – tension

The sense of the sublime, then, has its source in an unnatural tension of the nerves, such as is produced both by fear and by pain, and may even be aroused in some degree by imitating the facial and bodily expressions of fear and pain.

As conclusions of the chapter, we can asses that:

First, and maybe most significant, the Byronic hero (including Satan) is always proud, ardent, and heroic; he is larger than the life encompassing him. In all of his manifestations the Byronic hero embodies the Romantic longing for the days of individual heroism, for the age when a leader ruled his followers by pure courage, power of will, and personal charisma. The Byronic hero is basically a sympathetic personality. He is portrayed as being wounded by friends or by society; therefore his rebellion has always a credible cause. And no matter how his error or sin may look, he is on no account brutal or vicious.

The Byronic Hero, is habitually well-mannered with the women, frequently loves arts, has a powerful attachment for honor, and bears the burden of some guilt.

What predominantly distinguish in the Byronic hero are his veil of mystery and his air of sublimity. The Byronic hero is eternally haunted by secret sins, and he suffers a hidden remorse which explodes in sporadic eruption of temper, or of humanity. Lastly, the air of sublime, of fallen angel, is borrowed by the Byronic Hero directly from Hamlet or Milton's Satan. The major line of Byronic Hero’s descent extends from Hamlet through Satan to Prometheus and Manfred.

CHAPTER III – SATANIC AND BYRONIC HEROS: A DICHOTOMY

It took more than a hundred years and two major revolutions (French and American) for Milton’s Satan to gain the sympathy of the readers in the battle between the angels of Heaven and the fallen angels of Hell. He started to be admired as the personification of the rebel who proclaimed his antagonism and equal power to Jehovah; he was acknowledged as the factual hero of the epic.

Readers, philosophers and writers asserted that Milton had instinctively, but truthfully, advocated the Devil – rebellious energy in opposition to Jehovah – repressive limitation.

In the Statesman's Manual (1816) Coleridge documented the disturbing elements in the magnetism of this hero of dark mystery, and advised against it, but unsuccessfully.  Instantaneously disturbing the life, literature, and philosophy of the 19th century, the Byronic hero started his own life. He became the ideal for the conduct of advanced young men and the center of women’s nostalgia. And Byron was destined to find out that the literary characters he created as alter egos of the author could exercise power even over him: his social discredit following Byron’s wife separation in 1816 was acknowledged by Walter Scott to be the result of how the poet “Childe Harolded himself, and outlawed himself, into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination.” Literary history shows, equally, that Byron could at the most contribute to but not manage the myth-making development of Byronism.

The Romantic hero types, – the Outcast Noble, Faust, Manfred, Prometheus, Satan – are always lonely, and are essentially and bravely rebellious, first against the social order, and afterward against God himself or the universe. They are lonely in the logic of the 18th century: by nativity, by personality, or by breeding; because of the sharpness of their minds and sensibilities – but nearly all of them are lonely as well because of their moral choice, and this crucial decision, with Hamlet, Manfred, Satan, or Prometheus, is seen as the supreme experience of their misfortune. Anyway, adjustment to the society norms and conventions is not possible for them; they either fall to splendid defeat, cursing God as they die, or they live for the sole purpose of renovating the world. To conclude, it is significant that most of Byronic heroes descend from the outlaws of 18th century: Cain of the Bible becomes the hero of Byron's tragic poem; the Milton's Satan is metamorphosed into the Prometheus figure in Shelley’s work. This conversion mirrors the fundamental change of values in 19th century and romanticism: from compliance with social norms of behavior or thinking, to drastic individualism; from the modest and correct reasoning, common sense, and the appropriate consideration of mankind, to the hunger to know and experience everything, to embrace infinities; from submission to God and the social order, to heroism and arrogance.

The critic William Hazlitt proclaimed Satan “the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem” and suggested that the rebel and fallen angel confronting Heaven was the reflection of Milton’s own revolt against political despotism. Percy Shelley also claimed that Satan morally superior to Milton’s oppressive God; he acknowledged though that Satan’s prominence of character is stained by vengefulness and arrogance.

It was exactly this feature of stained grandeur which made Satan so attractive to Byron and become a pattern of Byronic hero.

Of course characters like Satan or Manfred are extraordinary which is the main characteristic of romantic heroes. I think it would be redundant to re-examine the features of Byronic heroes. All features of Byronic heroes described in Chapter II give us the clear idea of the dichotomy of romantic character. But a deeper analysis must lead us to an overview of romanticism and I think it would be an appropriate approach of Byronic hero. He is after all a romantic character and all authors examined in this thesis must be placed in the context of European romanticism. It is my conviction that we must not forget, in any work dedicated to romanticism, about Eminescu and his romantic heroes sharing the same traits as Byronic heroes.

In a well-known article, "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms," Arthur O. Lovejoy argued that "the romantic term has come to mean so many things that no longer mean anything. He ceased to perform the function of linguistic sign. Moreover, the American critic considered that romantic ideas were largely heterogeneous, not embedded in a logical and sometimes fundamental antithetical system in their implications. The thesis of A.O. Lovejoy is contradicted by R. Wellek, who states that "the main romantic currents form a whole body of theories and styles from which a coherent group of ideas is involved."

The inadaptability that is spoken of as a defining manifestation of the romantic spirit is suggested by most of the aesthetics that were written during Romanticism. In "About Naive and Sentimental Poetry," Schiller considers that the modern poet has long despised the ruined unity of mankind's youth. That "Sehnsucht" that the German theorists of Romanticism consider the characteristic feature of modern poetry (which will soon be called romantic) belongs to a man haunted by anxiety, crammed with unspeakable desires.

The classic-romantic contrast formulated first by Wilhelm Schlegel and, at his suggestion, Mrs. Stäel, Manzoni, etc., always stress the tendency to break the balance manifested by the romantic spirit, the incompatibility between the romantic soul and the moral health of the old times. Refuge in the dream, the myth, the childhood of the individual or of mankind, sinking into the obscure areas of human consciousness represent as many canals and sublimations of the refusal to accept what was considered a painful reality. Even the indifferent explanations of the social factor of romantic aspiration to the areas of the dream, the original chaos or the past allow us to discover the objective substrate of solitude, of romantic inadaptability, allow us to discover the outer coordinates of that "furrow of dissatisfaction" "effort to impossible" that the theorists of the romantic phenomenon speak.

The romantic, soul, therefore the Byronic one, is a soul torn by antagonisms, a soul that finds no peace. "The romantic man is the personification of an unhappy marriage." Conflict is constitutive and irreducible. In Arnold Hauser's opinion, "nothing stands out for the romantic in a state of equilibrium: in all manifestations, the problems of their historical position and their emotional tearing are mirrored. The moral life of humanity has always been in the form of conflicts and struggles (…). But in romanticism these conflicts become forms of existence of consciousness. Life and spirit, nature and culture, history and eternity, solitude and society, revolution and tradition no longer appear only as logical or alternative moral correlations, among which you can choose, but as possibilities you want to achieve at the same time."

Seeking "a key", a common denominator for a united understanding of European romanticism, American "romanticist" H. Remak discovers in the romantic duality and in the aspiration denied by Hauser, an ever-renewed aspiration to remedy the inner tearing: "Romantism is the attempt to cure the universal rupture, is the painful consciousness of dualism, accompanied by the desire to solve it by obtaining an organic monism; is the desire to reconcile two opposite elements, to make the antithesis to be followed by synthesis."

From the consciousness of this duality and from the desire to abolish it, according to this interpretation, the great myths created by romance: nature, childhood, elementary and primitive, all that does not lead to the primary sources of existence, draw us closer to nature.

It was first established in the consciousness of romantics, then in the minds of those who studied the phenomenon, a romantic archetype with intensely distinctive manifestations, manifestations that are exerted in the spiritual as well as in the current life, an archetype usually defined in opposition to the classic archetype. In his study "Classicism, Romanticism, Baroque", G. Calinescu, after affirming the inexistence of pure artistic phenomena ("Classicism-Romanticism are two ideal types, practically non-existent in the state of retrieval"), formulates the classic contrast Classical-romantic, transposed from the aesthetic field into the typological one: "The classic individual is the utopia … of a perfectly perfect human body and spirit, normal (serving as norms to others), so canonical. The romantic individual is the utopia of a totally abnormal, ill-balanced and sick man, that is to say, with exacerbated intellect and sensitivity, summing up all spiritual aspects from primitive to genius. From the sanitary point of view, the classic hero is "healthy", but a gladiator-like health that involves a failure of synapses. The romantic, it is known, is sick, infirm, tuberculoses, crazy, … Returning with nuances, the classic is a man like all people (…), the romantic is a monster in everything: a monster of beauty or ugliness, kindness or wickedness, or all this mixed (…). In adapting to existence, the classic looks good-suited and is understandable in his acts; the romantic is bizarre, aberrant, incomprehensible. The life of the classic is intelligible, geometric; romantic is "meaningless" or unrevealed. In astronomical terms, we say: "the classic is a solar, the romantic is a lunar. Classical time is noon, romantic time is midnight …". And diet is conclusive: "The classic drink milk, spring water, sells Falern or eats Ibla honey and fruits. The romantic consumes gin, opium, or drink water from Lete because he needs either exciting or analgesic to support or forget the hell of life. " (my translation)

The typical romantic conflict, the human-world conflict, whose inner results are serenity, tears, audacity, evasion, etc., allows us to repeat what has been said at the beginning of these lines, namely that inadaptability is the source of most of the romantic attitudes. This inadaptability involves colors, tones, and various intensities.

Essentially, there is a passive, introspective and active inadaptability, the latter being exteriorized in the romantic types of the titan, the demon, in other words the rebellious; The first characterized by excessive morbidity (spleen or disease of the century), a dream retreat or hallucination (possibly caused by drugs). Hence is coming up the issue of the ethical valorization of these attitudes.

In a first version of romantic titanism, which we find in Jean Paul Richte's novel Titan (1803), the titanic character, the demonic Roquairol, is a frenetic and mysterious personality, materializing the Sturn und Drang titanism. Byron's Corsar with his shadowy demonism is considered admirable for his defiant revolt; Lucifer and Cain of the same Byron assert the titanic side of their personality through lucid denial attitudes, and Shelley's Prometheus is pure and immaculate.

Analyzing the expressions of romantic-Byronic inadaptability, dosages and discrimination are required. Romantic sensitivity has varied in the face of a shocking reality, appearing in different attitudes and gestures. The romantic feel uprooted and alone in a hostile world, seek refuge in the past, utopia, childhood, nature, dream, hallucination, or, if his temper and his surroundings are favorable, he becomes rebellious, violent, blasphemous, prophetic, in others words he manifests his dissatisfaction as an extraverted. Common factor of these attitudes that have literally outlined in a rich typology remain the factor of inadaptability. Moreover, such a typological variety born in mutilating circumstances for the human personality is not specific only to the Romantic Movement.

III. 1. DEMONISM, TITANISM, FAUSTIANISM

What was called Byronian demonism or satanism or even only Byronism (the spectacular character of Byron's life and death associated with his name an attitude, which he did not actually inaugurate, but he illustrated it with utmost indiscretion) manifests itself with romantic poems inspired by the English poet's first trip to the Orient. Before this trip, young Byron, a Poe's imitator and Swift's admirer, and other caustic spirits of the sec. Eighteenth century, had written classical poems. The Classical Muse presides over a satirical poem as the one who imposes the young Byron on the attention of the literary circles: "English Barbs and Scots critics." Classicism also had to remain a dimension of Byronic poetic creation until the last stage of the poet's life; therefore we must be cautious when we characterize romanticism through total and categorical opposition to classicism.

If, at a later stage, Byronic satanism accepts the suggestions of Miltonian luciferism, for the time being, during the period of oriental youth poems, it is, literally speaking, tributary to the English Gothic novel, at the end of the sec. 18th century. Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole and other Gothic novelists opposed the balanced and optimistic hero of the great realistic novels of the 19th century. An obscure, mysterious, obscene character, pursued by an unrelenting destiny, consumed by sinful passions ready to conclude alliances with supernatural forces and usually crushed by them. Byron, a friend and admirer of some of the genre's representatives, attributes some of his romantic protagonists features suggested by the damn, mysterious, demonic and perverse character of the Gothic novel.

As for the romantic demoniac, there are elements from the same source also in Coleridge's poetry, which became a model for Byron's demonic poems. Coleridge’s sailor from the poem The Story of the Old Seaman is damned, overwhelmed by solitude, because of sin committed (killing albatross). His physical portrait is frightening. He has a gray beard, glassy eyes, whose fascinating look stops the passers-by. In the composition of the most satanic of the Byron heroes, namely Conrad, we will find suggestions from the ballad of this poet.

In 1812, when the first Byron poem of the series of Oriental "Childe Harold Pilgrimage" appears, the main character does not yet give us all the data and notes for the demonic hero of the subsequent poems, and the satanic note – always neutralized by the freedom of protagonist’s character – is still a juvenile glare.

Young Harold, as it appears in the first songs (the last songs of the poem will be written by a mature Byron) is consumed by spleen, sinful and hopeless, pressed by a grisly fatality, incomprehensible to those around him. He had a "sick heart," and to forget about the experiences of his depraved youth, spent between the walls of a venerable castle (a former monastery), goes on board melancholically, crushing a tear between the genes as the ship sails away from the shore.

The Giaour, the second of the Byronic shadow series, brings to Childe Harold an extra of demonism, a plus of lushness, a plus of mystery and shame. With his pale face, with the fatal look, the Giaour must appear as a thirst for absolute. Without piety and faith, he does not wait or ask for forgiveness for the crimes that his youth has shed. No hope lightens his life.

In 1813, the Corsar appears, adding to the Byronic character, treats which he had not had in previous editions. Conrad is the head of a gang of thieves, pirates settling on one of the islands of the Greek archipelago, where these outlaws live a life of unrestricted freedom and from where they attack and rob the Turkish settlements around. The island of pirates is a kind of symbol of free life, dominated by the call of the sea, admired by adventure. Conrad, the embodiment of the grim, nihilist protest, is the hero who declares war to the civilized world. Folded in mystery, admired, feared, he leads his band with almost fascinating power and is blindly followed by his henchmen. About his past no one knows anything, but they all suspect that desolate disappointments pushed him out of the law.

This outlaw, in perpetual conflict with society, embittered by the wickedness of men, also has deep feelings, pure love. But love cannot pull him off from the call of adventure. The hero does not disrupt man-society antagonism, which Conrad has paroxysmal forms. Conrad could have created a prototype for romantic generations. The hero of the third part of Mickiewicz's Ancesters (Străbunii) is called "Konrad," and he is a rebellious soldier, Byronic type, who asks the Faustian questions that Byron's Manfred, will also ask. The poem "Lara" seems to be the result of "Corsar" because Lara, returning to his field, accompanied by a piece of rice from the Orient, reminds of "Conrad" and the slave he saved from the harem in his previous poem. Lara is a Conrad that has overtaken the adventure phase, behaves like a generous senior (do not oppress his subjects), blatant and tired of life. The demon was replaced by the "spleen" illness, touched by the disease of the century ("mal du siècle").

In each of these characters, whose refusal to adapt is rhetorically and ostentatiously obsolete, there is a start of the revolt, a riot without a precise object but stimulated by the view of injustice and generous solidarity with the unjust. Harold is outraged at the sight of the servitude of the Spanish and Greek people. The poem Giaour begins with a glorification of the ancient Elade, in which Byron sees a symbol of freedom. Conrad is together with those in pain, and this solidarity is his only virtue, being "the man of one virtue and thousands of crimes". Lara is a generous and skeptical senior, ready to undertake reforms with easiness and indifference. These "generous" features of Byron's demonic character of his youth lead us to the subject of "Titanic Revolt," revolt based on aspiration to positive values. For Byron’s youth – terrible and grandiloquent – to channel to titanic romanticism, Byron will need some new life and culture experiences. After the interference of demonic with the guilty theme, Byron’s Satanism is enriched by a series of notes from Goethe's tragedy as well as the myth of Lucifer and Prometheus.

The figure of Dr. Faust was considered by the adherents of Sturm und Drang to be an embodiment of titanism and his deed, a protest against human oppression, act to the last consequences. So was seen Faust by the young Goethe, who at this time exalted the gesture of proletarian rebellion in the Prometheus fragment. Goethe, mature, turns Faust's titanic revolt into a drama of searching for the meaning of existence and knowledge. Stimulated by the reading of the first or both versions of Goethe's tragedy, romantic poets, will give to the Fausian theme the role of debating existential questions and symbolically expressing aspiration to absolute and impossible. This is the theme of poetry written by Byron, Lenau, Mickiewicz, Madach. In Byron's case, Faust theme intermediates the transition from the theatrical Satanism of Oriental poems to the other resonance of luciferic titanism in Cain.

Byron's faustian drama is "Manfred". Like Faust, Manfred masters the magic elements of nature, whose spirits they call to ask, not Faust, youth and pleasure, but forgetfulness and especially self-oblivion. His pain was the supreme teacher ("pain is science"), an idea whose origin we find in Buddhist philosophy. The moment he tries (like Faust) to commit suicide, Manfred discovers both the force and the sterility of a life consumed within the limits of self.

The ego is a grave. Dominated by this conviction, Manfred knows despair. Manfred's tragedy represents for Byron of the moment when the pride of loneliness, dominant in youth poems, disappears. It is a step towards the new version of Byronic demonism, inflated with protester and positive meanings. Byronic demonism will interfere with the Prometheus motive and the Miltonian luciferism.

After, in 1816, Byron wrote a short "Prometheus," in 1820, Shelley gave his poetic drama "Prometheus Unbound." The title prefigures the change that the ancient myth will make taking distance from Eschil's drama. The final reconciliation between the Champion and the Oppressor of mankind is a "too weak" catastrophe for a tragedy.

Shelley returns, in the spirit of a protester romanticism, to his titanic gesture all his strength, opposing the two antagonists forever and imagining the release of Prometheus, the friend of the people, with the help of a symbolic and collective character – Demogorgon – and Asia – Love. Also in the preface Shelley formulates the analogy of Prometheus-Satan, but, for reasons that characterize the purity and generosity of the poet, he prefers Prometheus: "The only imaginary being similar to Prometheus is Satan, but Prometheus is, after my judgment, a more poetic character than Satan, because in addition to courage and grandeur, resolute opposition and patience to almighty force, he can be depicted as lacking any ambition, envy, thirst of vengeance and desire for power, feelings that in the hero of "Paradise Lost" meet with interest. (…). Prometheus is indeed the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, being encouraged by the purest and most true impulses toward the most beautiful and noble purposes." In this liberal spirit, the demon becomes a variant of the titan, and the latter is considered to be the most expressive symbol of rebellion.

The cosmic landscape depicted in Shelley's poetic drama, as in Milton's "Paradise Lost" as in Byron's "Cain", Lermontov's "Demon", Madach's "Tragedy of Man", "The End of Satan" by Hugo and Eminescu's "Luceafărul" (one of the romantic poets that illustrate, on Edgar Papu’s oppinion, "the category of the far away"), becomes a background for the giant rebellion of the titan, while at the same time fueling the philosophical problem that the impose issues such as Faustianism, Prometheus, Luciferism.

Much of romantic titanism – with its demonic note – proceeds right from Miltonian luciferism. Milton the Puritan, but also the man of revolution, had run a reconsideration of the biblical myth, after which Lucifer-Satan had ceased to be a genius of perversion and a symbol of destruction to become a myth of energy and revolt. Milton's position towards the myth of the fall reveals powerful Renaissance influences in the sense of a supreme cult of individualism. So, in the "Paradise Lost" conceived as a poem about "the first disobedience of man," Lucifer – Satan plays the main role. The force of the character is overwhelming in the note of that ambiguity, which spoke of a "declared meaning" and not "occult sense" of the Miltonian poem.

In his "History of English Literature," Hyppolite Taine notes: "What is most beautiful in this poetry about God is that the first role belongs to the devil. This ridiculous devil in the Middle Ages, a crooked sorcerer, dirty clown, a trivial and evil monkey, head of orchestra on an old witches Sabbath, has become a giant and a hero."

When he included Cain's myth in his mystery, Byron had left behind the theatrical gesture of the satanic character of his youth. Concomitantly with this separation from the spectacular Satanism of the first creation period, Byron, matured by numerous and crucial experiences of life (exile), public (adherence to the conspiratorial movement of emancipation of the Italians) and culture (contact with Goethe's "Faust" , with Shelley's "Prometheus", updating in his consciousness the Miltonic luciferic poem), gives the demonic attitude the mission of symbolizing an act of rebellion and of facilitating the debate of ethical questions of deep resonance.

Cain's story followed the poet for a long time. The Calvinist impregnated Scottish ambience, in which he had spent his childhood, had left him with a sense of rebellion against the dissolving doctrine of predestination. According to this doctrine, Cain had killed because he lacked grace. At Byron, Cain is a rebel against the Creator, a demonic rebel, since he manifests his revolt through murder. The Creator has allowed evil. Although he created the "perfect" man, he allowed him to be tempted to pour him back. The first people were punished by the tyrant, because they tasted the tree of knowledge. Cain himself is ravished by the desire to know.

Lucifer also appears (between him and the tempting serpent of Eve, Byron sees no connection). Lucifer speaks in favor of man's rationality as a result of the taste of the fruit of knowledge, a reason whose praise the fallen and rebelled angel throughout the drama: "I am not tempted by anyone but by truth." Cain's uprising, stimulated by Lucifer's inducement, is the revolt fed by desire for knowledge, rebellion against the tyranny of mysteries and darkness. Byronic Lucifer is a lucid, sad, alone, without illusion, a grim rebel. Byron's Cain is, ultimately, a character of the century.

The synthesis of these themes and motifs is also found in Lermontov's "Demon" (1840) and implies the romantic Russian in a specific tone dominated by the tragic note. Lermontov's demon is also a rebel from the lineage of the Miltonian Lucifer, through contempt for divinity and defiance. His revolt is marked by a heavy sadness, a final despair that makes him walk, like Lukeafar, the astral spaces with the fatigue given by the consciousness of eternity. The lermontovian demon is devoured by a spleen amplified to cosmic proportions. The hypostasis of the genius of evil makes him tired. His trance melancholy is temporarily reduced by love for a mortal – Tamara. The idea of ​​redemption through love appears so frequent in romanticism, but also the hypostasis of the immortal tired of eternity and eager for the warmth of love, a hypostasis we find in Vigny's "Eloa" in Eminescu's "Luceafărul" and before, in " Amphitrion "of Kleist (1807). Like Luceafarul, the demon descends at night, watching Tamara's sleep, producing magical dreams, a state of longing, fear, ecstasy. She embraces her dream, taking the face of a young man of unparalleled beauty, with a sad look. Aspiration to mortal life is a chimera because the demon cannot imagine himself but eternal among astral spaces. Tamara, like Eloa, accepts salvation, but the kissing of the demon is deadly. The dual dominant vision in Lermontov's poem, as in many other romantic poems of demonism, like in Byron, is of the Manicheist source. The concept of a dualist initial world of, Persian source was embraced by romantics, for whom antagonism is the essence of the universe and found poetic expression especially in titanic themes.

A new version of romantic demonism appears in a late period of romance, to Hungarian poet Imre Madach, in "Human tragedy." The historical Herder type optimism, present in romantic poems that seek to communicate poetically the becoming of mankind in an ascendant process as the "Legend of the Centuries", is replaced in some works of this age by a pessimism aggravated by the understanding of history as an irrational, impossible to explain through laws, a deployment within which the variety of events is always reducible to a single significance. Close to Eminescu's "Memento Mori" from the point of view of historical understanding, Madach's poem summarizes thematic suggestions from various diretions. One is obviously the Byron influence, the other comes from Goethe's "Faust" (Lucifer's character retains many of the features of Mephisto, the element of negation).

Madach's version of the demonic motive, however, to a certain extent separates from the Byronic conception: Lucifer, who urged the first men to taste the tree of knowledge, did not become their friend, like Byron's Prometheus or Lucifer. He cynically gives Adam and Eve the dream of history, the eternal repetition of identical hypostases. Through metempsychosis, Adam knows different epochs, always remaining naive, eager for faith and certainties systematically shattered by the mocking cynicism of Lucifer. The essential idea lies in eternal stillness and in the recommendation of stoic ataraxia (a = without, taraxis = truble), announcing Eminescu's "Glossa".

One by one, all of Adam's illusions about the possibility of realizing his dream of freedom are shattered. There is a cosmic flight on Lucifer's wings that responds to the need for cosmic projection of faustic and titanic issues, the uranium vocation, the illustration of the "far away" category, being a constant of the creation of the great romantic poets. The flight ends with the arrival on the frozen globe, populated by the last men, degenerate Eskimos. Awakened by dreams at the gates of paradise from which he was banished, Adam wants to commit suicide, but Eve announces that he will be a father. Life overcomes and Adam is ready to start the long millenary struggle to go through the stages seen in the dream. What new Imre Madach brings is the idea that luciferism loses constructive and revolutionary meanings. If at Byron, Cain was a leader in the fight against divine interdiction, in Madach, Lucifer's rationalism becomes negative, sterile, and pernicious to the innocent man.

Romantic demonism gives the opportunity to express various ideological and emotional contents: the iconoclastic revolt with the terrible stage of Byron, then the bitter deception, expressed by defiant gestures and evil actions at Lermontov, and finally, sterile and paralyzing negativity at Imre Madach.

The demonic theme also contaminated the typology of genius, as it contaminates in romanticism also the erotic poetry. The two hypostases – the genius and the demon – often coexist in the same character. Eminescu, in the youthful period, portrayed in the novel "Desert Genius" a portrait of rebellion (Toma Nour) that accumulates the features and attitudes of some of the romantic prototypes mentioned earlier. Satanism is a reversed sentimentality, an attitude born of deep deceptions, which explains the contrasts of his nature: he is skeptical, mocking but engages in the revolutionary struggle, he is cold, tough, but exacerbated, it lives in the dream world, but it is capable of social action.

Dionis from the short story "Poor Dionys" belongs rather to the typology of the dreamer. Demonic Titanism presides over his magical practices; in the moment when drunk by power (a moment followed by a fall) he believes God himself, he becomes identical with the rebellious Lucifer.

"Angel and Demon" has a social-protest note. The demon becomes from cosmic titan a revolted proletarian, "an apostate soul." The character becomes an iconoclast, a non-conformist, and an anti-traditionalist. Dead on a bed of poor, hopeless, the rebellious demon is saved by the angel (innocent daughter of the king) who illuminates his miserable agony and ensures reconciliation through love, which is a possible solution to the demonic problem in romanticism.

The redemption, the salvation by love of the fallen angel is possible in Victor Hugo's poem, "The End of Satan", begun in exile (1853) and remains unfinished, published postum. While maintaining a Manichean vision and cosmic projection, "The End of Satan" is distinguished by a happy blend of evolutionary vision, mythical ideation and mysticism.

"The myth of the forgiven evil, of the "end of Satan," allows Victor Hugo to accentuate the experience of fear, taking from chaos only the hope in the cosmos, the impetus to light, the struggle between shadow and light, the final victory of light. And we must also see that this myth covers both the cosmos and the history of mankind. If the great enigma is evil, evil is both brutality, bestiality in nature and social injustice; the disappearance of the night in the light is, at the same time, the flourishing of society through moral progress." The conclusion of the great French critic seems to best synthesize the complexity of the phenomenon questioned by Victor Hugo. What surprised Hugo's "End of Satan" is a paradox: Hugo's optimism (the result of his conception on the myth of forgiveness, echoes of mystical philosophy) abducted Satan's significance given by his predecessors (Milton and Byron). The regaining of the mystical lost unit is symbolized by V. Hugo through the "end of Satan". Although in Hugo's poem, Satan, saved, resurrected in heaven, loses its quality of rebellious titan, generally in romantic mythology, Lucifer, the fallen angel, proud of his fall, continues to remain a symbol of rebellion and protest-attitude.

III. 2. MAL DU SIECLE

Melancholy, a certain disgust of life, is a typical romantic attitude, the spread of which was thought to be responsible Byron, first by contemporaries, then by immediate successors. This unclear state, apparently opposed to the demonic state, in reality complementary to it is the English spleen, whose French variant was le mal du siècle (illness of the century); the same irresistible melancholy, the same unsettled sadness is called by the Germans Weltschmerz.

Byron is known in Europe even before being translated, almost exclusively in his romantic hypostasis. Byron, endowed with the attributes of literary import, dominated the firmament of continental romanticism in the third and fourth decades, through epic poem poem and personality, susceptible to imitations of gestures and pictures, color and history – satisfied the requirements of a fashion and responded precisely to a moment of emotional crisis.

This period of Byron's massive influence on European sensibility ("Byron's genius is the romantic spirit of the nineteenth century," says G. Sand in "Essai sur le drame fantastique" of 1839), the success of Byronism, which makes the Missolonghi fighter an idol and a myth, is the post-Napoleonic era, that still lived in the memory of the great heroes and major actions, and whose taste for individual affirmation was enriched by the reading of Byron’s poems. And the poet, often compared with Goethe for the revealing influence in the epoch, intended to be a prototype of a national hero in a period of bith and affirmation of modern nations, is extrapolated in the legend, marking the moment of Byron's separation from Byronism, of the poet from his literary offspring, the artist from the vogue.

France, a country that, of course, the poet did not visit was the lever that sent Europe the cult for Byron and the fashion of Byronism. The destiny of the opera and the author anticipates and follows between 1819 and 1835 the common trajectory of meteoric successes: from fanatical enthusiasm to the ironical repudiation of a complex of moral superiority. First of all, as an angel of the darkness, in the midst of an inexorable melancholy, by Lamartine, Vigny, Stendhal, Mrs. Staël, Musset, Gautier, Delavigne, Mérimée, Barbey d'Aurevilly, I remember only the celebrities of the 1825 generation, Byron conquers France and through the irony of Don Juan, whose caustic sarcasm launches the fashion of the self-indulgent cynic disapproval of the French spirit. It is worth noting that in an article in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" in 1843, Sainte-Beuve made this direction of Byron's success in France near the Marquis of Sade: "Two of the great inspirers of our moderns, one displayed and visible; the other clandestine – not too clandestine." Chateaubriand, whom Byron called the "skeptic who was the defender of Catholicism," and "the liberal who made himself the defender of royalty and divine right," was grieved that Byronian melancholy was pendant for René's illness and harshly judged the Englishman once, he argues, admired reading "Atala". Instead, the French criticism of the epoch counted Byron as the representative of the Romantic era, but without denying his typological qualities in the prolongation of the eighteenth century, and made with precision and firmness a clear distinction between Byron and Byronism: "Byron poetry is immortal; but let us not confuse somehow with the Byronism, this calamity that has haunted us enough in our past and that would have nothing better to do than to revive."

Revealing through the pertinence of the critical, enthusiastic and lucid, passionate and impartial act in which the equivalence is established between the subject and the object are the fragments on Byron in Eckermann's "Conversations with Goethe”. The balanced judgment, punctuated by critical corrections but also generous in superlatives, is based on the emblematic pattern represented by Byron and which became the role of the unifying poles, Euphorion: "As a representative of the contemporary poetic age, I could not use someone else but him, who, without question, must be considered the greatest poet of the age, and then, Byron is neither antique nor romantic. He is the way life is today. That's what we needed. Besides, he was fitting, given his always discontented nature and his combatant attitude that led him to Missolonghi. Writing a Byron study is neither convenient nor advisable; yet I will not lose sight of it as of now, when I have the opportunity, to bring my prince and to remind him." (my translation)

Being fascinated by the personality of the English romantic, the people of the time have viewed this affective state as a virus, an epidemic of English source. Lermontov's Peciorin states in 1840 that the boredom fashion was set the English writers. In fact, even before the melancholy and black hearted heroes of the Byron’s oriental poems showed their boredom before their author had walked through the London salons, the tired melancholy and the early indifference, vague sadness, nostalgia that does not crystallize in a distinct aspiration, the disorientation that oscillates between despair and cynicism belonged to many literary characters. Diderot in "Lettres à Sophie Volland" offers for the first time a description of this feeling: "You do not know what spleen is or the English mist; I did not know either. I asked it to our Scotsman on our last walk, and this is what he said to me: "I have felt for twenty years a general malaise, more or less annoying; I never have a clear head. It is sometimes so heavy that it is like a weight that pulls you ahead, and that would take you from a window in the street, or to the bottom of a river if you were on the edge. I have black ideas, sadness and boredom; I am hurt everywhere, I want nothing, I cannot want; I try to amuse myself and to occupy myself; in vain, the gaiety of others afflicts me, I suffer to hear them laugh or speak. Do you know what kind of stupidity or bad humor you feel when you wake up after having slept too much? This is my ordinary state, life disgusts me ".

"You do not know what spleen or English steam is: I did not even know. Ask our Scottish to our last ride, and here is what he said to me: "I feel a general, more or less troublesome, 20 years ago; I never have a clear head. It is sometimes so hard that it is like a burden that pulls you in front of you and throws you from a window in the street, or on the bottom of a river if you're off shore. I have black ideas, sadness and boredom; I'm sick everywhere, I do not want anything, I do not know to want something; I want to distract myself and to worry about something, useless, the joy of others makes me grieve, I suffer from hearing them laughing or talking. Do you know this kind of stupidity or mood that we try to wake up after sleeping too much? Here is my usual condition, my life is a disgust "(my translation).

A little later, Madame Roland (Jeanne-Marie Philippon) is also trying to describe this kind of melancholy, in a 17-year-old essay named De la mélancolie:

"The sweet melancholy I defend is never sad; it is but a change of pleasure from which it borrows all its charms. Similar to those golden clouds that embellish a sleeping sun, the mild melancholy steam intercepts the rays of pleasure, presenting them in a pleasant and new look. It is a great balsam for heart wounds; is a pendant to the joy of joy; diminishing it makes it more penetrating and more durable; it is a certain delicacy of sentiment, a certain surrounding of imagination that feels and does not express itself " (my translation).

Without the need to go so far in the direction of the past, we reach Werther and Wertherism, especially as in the fiery thirst for the Goetheian hero, we distinguish a note of titanism, which was in the spirit of Sturm und Drang. Werther, a titan of sensitivity, knew why he was unhappy and his suicide echoed with a protest. Jean Jacques Rousseau was convinced that his unhappiness was due to a corrupt civilization that had faded away with fatal consequences of nature. For none of them the sadness, the "illness" of the soul was not accompanied by voluptuousness and pride.

Simultaneously with the romantic titanism, which provokes the heaven with colossal gestures of rebellion, the disconcerted character appears in the romantic writings; his exaggerated sensitivity and sometimes effeminate, injured by a brutal ambience, makes him sink in himself, seeking refuge, giving up active attitudes, or prematurely loosing illusions and devoured by boredom, compensating sadness through indifference. Liberty William Lowell of Ludwig Tieck's novel of the same name (1796), a character who is filled with boredom and disorientation, precedes the "Titan" of Jean Paul Richter (1803) by a few years, both attitudes seeming to be the same set of inadequacies.

Chateaubriand, Senancour, Benjamin Constant created young figures contaminated by mal du siecle, characters in whose psychological structure the intimate experiences of their authors have gained a decisive weight. Characters such as René, Obermann, Adolphe are prior to Childe Harold or Lara, so the English poet has been attributed to the paternity of attitudes that he did not inaugurate but he portrayed them in the most spectacular way.

The type of romantic melancholy, haunted by unrestrained uneasiness, driven by the desire of evasion, originated in the autobiographical character of Chateaubriand's "René" story (1802). René is tragically predestined, his birth has caused his mother's death, he is mated with sadness, and his only attachment – to his sister Amélie – becomes a source of horror because Amélie loves him incestuously. Looking for voyages in voyages, ruins and graves attract him as a symbol of human vanity. The wild landscape, the exotic, luxuriant nature of America still virgin fascinates it, awakening in him reminiscences of J.J. Rousseau source. His meditations are dominated by melancholy and the thought of the vanity of all things. The feeling of inner void and the desolate loneliness does not leave him, the nostalgia of the infinite in time and space, a sense of death that obsesses him. The disgust of life, René's boredom, are compatible with a state of romantic exaltation, sometimes expressed grandiloquent. René is, in fact, a passionate, dominated by imagination, and his confession can be regarded, as Gaëtan Picon stated in "The History of French Literature" (cited above), as an act of "liberating psychoanalysis". René finds consolation in religion. This is actually the cure for mal du siecle, which Chateaubriand recommends. "Disease" is not for the author of the "Genius of Christianity" as an exclusive product of civilization. Chactas, the old Indian in Atala, tells René his unhappy youthful love for Atala, the daughter of an enemy tribe. And Chactas finds, as René finds, relief in faith.

The expression of a feeling of inadaptability that, in Chateaubriand – a descendant of an old noble family – took acute forms during the revolution and the years of emigration, the melancholy of René and Chactas is nothing more than a projection of the author's subjectivity. Rene's inadequacy is manifested by decisive gestures: the civilization escape, the embrace of faith.

When the character dominates exaltation, refrains from outward-looking effusions and grand-outcropping, psychology is gaining, as happens in Benjamin Constant's analytical novel "Adolphe" – author of a "Journal" that reconstitutes a troubled, torn soul, the antagonism between personal ambitions and melancholy state.

"Adolphe" (1816), a novel of extreme simplicity, describes the love of a sensuous and arrogant young man and a passionate and feminine woman. The nudity of the intrigue, the smallness of the events recalls the laugh of La Fayette's psychological novel; the picturesque frame, the physical portraits are almost nonexistent. It is an analytical novel of classical fact, only the main character has a romantic structure, being touched by a special form of mal du siecle, whose symptoms are indicated by the author in the preface: "I wanted to paint in Adolphe one of the major diseases of our century; That fatigue, that uncertainty, that lack of force, that perpetual analysis that doubles every feeling with a hidden thought, and thereby corrupts the feelings of the very moment of their birth."

Adolphe, like his author, "could never forget he was alive." He looks at him living and records how love for Eleonora is extinguished. The social harmony of the "sickness" that so many romantics have achieved could have been represented, in Chateaubriand's case, by shattering events for the certainties of a nobleman. But there is another historical and spiritual context as we learn from a confession of Musset, "The Confession of a Child of the Century" (Confessions d'un enfant du siècle, 1836), which shows with an excess of rhetoric that the source of sadness and anxiety is the deep disappointment felt by the generation of the poet over the failure of the promises made by the Revolution and Napoleon's empire: "Conceived between two battles, raised in boarding schools, in the sound of drums, thousands of children looked at Dark eyes, tensing his muscles. From time to time a bloody father appeared, lifted him to his chest with decorations, and left them down and strolling, and left again. All these children were drops of hot blood that had flooded the earth and were born in the war for war." It was precisely the source of Byron’s disappointment.

Pushkin's Evgheni Oneghin, a character designed by his author between 1825-1830, bears the heroic legacy of Byronic heroes and melancholy of René, but he is a Russian boyar who suffers from the crushing inactivity of his cast. Rich, cultivated, dandy, he is prey to an incurable indifference, to a boredom in whose poor atmosphere it cannot germinate any aspiration. In the society, on his estate, the disease follows him. The virus, like the estate, is the benefit of an inheritance. He believes he’s incapable of loving; he has the merrit to prevent Tatiana from being unfit for any attachment. Evgheni Oneghin accumulates features that are of the romantic inadaptability and others that prefigure a type with intense circulation in the romantic works that will be written from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of it and later: the type of loser that will be imposed in Russian literature in the variant called "the unessential man" (especially in Cehov).

Romantic characters experience decisive mutations, sometimes spectacularly presented. In line with the romantic vision, character transformation is interesting in view of the paroxysmal moment. It is important, in a romantic spirit, the result of the crisis that made Conrad a rebel in the terms of the law, René a melancholic who escapes in time and space. But Pushkin is interested in not so much a crisis, but a slow involution. At the center of his versed novel, he is indeed a figure of romantic inadequacy, but the angle of view of the character facilitates the transition to a thematic and narrative technique that will be of a later moment in the history of literature.

Evgheni Oneghin, the first sketch of the "unnecessary man," an eloquent specimen of the type of noble rattle, is invested with attributes of soul nobility, suppressed by the irreplaceable inertia of a vivid class. He is meritorious as an individual conscience, but condemned as a descendant of an inactive social category.

One of Lermontov's most famous heroes – Peciorin – characterized by his creator as "a hero of our time", introduces us again within the romantic typology of inadaptability, with all the traits we know extremely accentuated to him. From the series of episodes unrelated to each other and centered on Peciorin, the figure of a character in which the demonic notes (Peciorin is grim, fatal, strange, enigmatic, miserable) is combined with that disoriented and abusive life, which makes him inadaptable.

The physical portrait of Peciorin highlights some features that belong to the sad demon. Peciorin is of an aristocratic relaxation (calm, unassuming) and has white aristocratic hands with pale and thin fingers. He had a childish smile, blond hair, black eyes. When he laughed, his eyes did not laugh. "It is – Maxim Maximovici discovers – or the sign of an evil character or that of a deep and continuous sadness."

The sadness, the boredom, the fatigue of Peciorin have its source in exhausting and shocking experiences of extreme youth, to which the character alludes to his confessions, but which remain unknown to the end. Peciorin finds no consolation (even temporarily) in love, as some Byronic heroes, no longer vibrates at the sight of injustice, and is not enthusiastic at the sight of liberating eagles like Child Harold; he finds no refuge in faith, like René, or in nature. Alone, lucid, pressed by the burden of a fatality that his imagination always aggravates, he is the man who brings misfortune to women (Bela, Princess Mary, Vera) and he does not feel the soul warmed by love, he is a sad and unfulfilled Don Juan, a dandy without conviction, who adopts cynicism in a compensatory way and in the form of preventive defense.

Under all circumstances, he remains lucid and looks upon living with ruthless curiosity that excludes the possibility of any actual exaltation. Lermontov said that Peciorin is not the portrait of a man but of a generation, and the title of the book even suggests this generalization.

Concluding this chapter, I would say that the great dichotomy of Byronic hero (the hero of romanticism) is the coexistence of titanism and melancholy, not necessarily in the same character, but in the same literary movement in 19th century. All others dichotomies that each analyzed protagonist shows through his traits, are subsequent to this major one, and it is the value of the English romanticism in the exceptional exposure of the heights and deeps the human soul and spirit can reach on its quest to absolute.

THESIS CONCLUSION

I think it is important to understand the Byronic Hero because it can help us perceive more evidently what Albert Camus has called l’homme revolte and philosophy of rebellion.

The Byronic Hero may be only rather remotely related to the heroic tradition having its peak in Wagner or Nietzsche, but he is most closely related to the other belief, also derived from Romanticism – the metaphysical rebellion. It is overall rebellion because it is a revolt not only on a political plane, but also on the religious and philosophical level – and occasionally, in opposition to the existence itself.

The tradition of overall rebellion has continued to our days through surrealism or existentialism. The age of angry men is neither so far away nor postmodernism. It is not difficult to see, I believe, that the Byronic heroism, with its peculiar sensibility and particularly with its defiant Satanism, gave the first eloquent signs of the modern revolt. Manfred, with all his models and his descendants, has certainly thrown an extended shadow over Europe. Our difficulty is not only to comprehend this revolt, though, but some way to surmount it. As Camus says, and so many critics have the same opinion (even if they do not embrace his assumption), some ways must be found to reiterate the power of basic individual values in the confused or meaningless universe in which this rebellion led us. Camus claims that the means for this reiteration of values can be established right in the definition of the notion of rebellion.

I STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT THE REVOLT MUST BE AWARE OF "LIMITS" IF IT IS TO BE "AUTHENTIC," AND THE LIMITS MUST BE REPRESENTED BY THE RESPECT OF OTHER PEOPLE AS FREE AND INDIVIDUAL BEINGS.

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