Manfred in the Mountains: The Byronic Sublime.
In 1816 with his reputation in tatters, separated from his wife, rumours of an affair with his half-sister Augusta, and besieged by bailiffs, Lord Byron sold his library and left England for ever with his valet and his companion Dr Polidori who was to provide a written account of the journey for the poet’s publisher John Murray. At the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Byron and Polidori met up with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary Jane Clairmont, step daughter of William Godwin. Out of this meeting of minds, the Gothic shocker Frankenstein and Dr Polidori’s story “The Vampyre” would emerge, and Byron would also meet Matthew Lewis, the author of a lesser-known gothic classic-The Monk, which the poet had unforgettably described in 1813 as “might have been written by Tiberius at Caprea…the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary.” Soon Byron tired of all this talk of the supernatural and sought out nature itself in the company of his friend Hobhouse who had arrived from England, Polidori having worn out his welcome. Byron kept an “Alpine Journal” (a sort of parallel text to his poetic drama “Manfred” painted by John Martin (above) which deals with supernatural exploits in an Alpine setting) of these wanderings which is fascinating, not only for the descriptions of natural beauty, but also for insights into the poet’s mind which might be considered instances of how terror and beauty operate upon the mind in the presence of nature. In addition to the picturesque details Byron imparts such as peasant women rowing boats upon glassy Swiss lakes or the tinkling of cow bells through the misty dawn, the poet also gives us descriptions of the natural scenery which are tinged with feelings of melancholy and loss. As Byron’s biographer Peter Quennell points out, the poet’s “sense of beauty was instinct with a sense of terror.”[1] Thus musing on a lonely mountain torrent leaping from a rock, with the aid of natural phenomena, Byron conjures up the imagery of the old familiar Death the pale rider; the sight conveys “the tail of a white horse streaming in the wind, such as it might be conceived would be that of the pale horse on which Death is mounted in the Apocalypse…Neither mist nor water.”[2] The poet bleakly likened “whole woods of withered pines, all withered; trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless” to himself and his family. His half-sister Augusta Leigh back in England would learn from a postscript to Byron’s “Alpine Journal” that “neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud” had allowed him “to lose [his own] wretched identity.”[3] As Quennell says, Byron’s descriptions of natural wonders should be distinguished from Gray and Walpole’s letters which either (in the case of the former) turn the alps into a gigantic picture gallery, or (in the case of the second) anticipate something of the spirit of Wordsworth’s Prelude with the association of “religion and poetry” in nature. Eighty years before Byron emotionally reacted to nature, Walpole and Gray had the “romantic point of view [which] certainly preceded the Romantic Movement”[4] which in art is captured in the views of cataracts, avalanches, and mountains in the Alps by de Loutherbourg, Martin, Turner, Danby and other painters.[5]
[1] Peter Quennel, Byron in Italy, (Collins, 1941), 50.
[2] Byron, “Alpine Journal,” Sep 23rd, 1816.
[3] Ibid, Sep, 28th-29th.
[4] Quennell, Byron in Italy, 49.
[5] Francis Danby 1793-1861, Tate and Bristol, 1988, Danby’s dark (in all senses) The Precipice was sold in 1894 as “Death of an Alpine Hunter,” though it’s thought to allude to an accident on Helvellyn, no. 25.
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