CAIN: A MYSTERY. "Now the Serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." Genesis, Chapter 3rd, verse 1. INTRODUCTION TO CAIN. CAIN was begun at Ravenna, July 16, and finished September 9, 1821 (vide MS. M.). Six months before, when he was at work on the first act of Sardanapalus, Byron had "pondered" Cain, but it was not till Sardanapalus and a second historical play, The Two Foscari, had been written, copied out, and sent to England, that he indulged his genius with a third drama-on a metaphysical subject, something in the style of Manfred" (Letters, 1901, v. 189). 66 Goethe's comment on reading and reviewing Cain was that he should be surprised if Byron did not pursue the treatment of such "biblical subjects," as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Conversatiors, etc., 1879, p. 62); and, many years after, he told Crabb Robinson (Diary, 1869, 1. 435) that Byron should have lived "to execute his vocation to dramatize the Old Testament." He was better equipped for such a task than might have been imagined. A Scottish schoolboy, "from a child he had known the Scriptures," and, as his Hebrew Melodies testify, he was not unwilling to turn to the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration. Moreover, he was born with the religious temperament. Questions "of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate," exercised his curiosity because they appealed to his imagination and moved his spirit. He was eager to plunge into controversy with friends and advisers who challenged or rebuked him, Hodgson, for instance, or Dallas; and he responded with remarkable amenity to the strictures and exhortations of such orthodox professors as Mr. Sheppard and Dr. Kennedy. He was, no doubt, from first to last a heretic, impatient, not to say contemptuous, of authority, but he was by no means indifferent to religion altogether. To "argue about it and about" was a necessity, if not an agreeable relief, to his intellectual energies. It would appear from the Ravenna diary (January 28, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 190, 191), that the conception of Lucifer was working in his brain any very definite conc Seine Quellen, von Alfred. to call his play "a Mystery," and, e "those very p. 207), Byron alludes to the Old Mysteries as profane productions, whether in English, French, Italian, or Spanish. The first reprint of the Chester Plays was published by the Roxburghe Club in 1818, but Byron's knowledge of Mystery Plays was probably derived from Dodsley's Plays (ed. 1780, 1., xxxiii.-xlii.), or from John Stevens's Continuation of Dugdale's Monasticon (vide post, p. 207), or possibly, as Herr Schaffner suggests, from Warton's History of English Poetry, ed. 1871, ii. 222-230. He may, too, have witnessed some belated Rappresentazione of the Creation and Fall at Ravenna, or in one of the remoter towns or villages of Italy. There is a superficial resemblance between the treatment of the actual encounter of Cain and Abel, and the conventional rendering of the same incident in the Ludus Coventriæ, and in the Mistére du Viel Testament; but it is unlikely that he had closely studied any one Mystery Play at first hand. On the other hand, his recollections of Gessner's Death of Abel, which "he had never read since he was eight years old," were clearer than he imagined. Not INTRODUCTION TO CAIN. CAIN was begun at Ravenna, July 16, and finished September 9, 1821 (vide MS. M.). Six months before, when he was at work on the first act of Sardanapalus, Byron had "pondered" Cain, but it was not till Sardanapalus and a second historical play, The Two Foscari, had been written, copied out, and sent to England, that he indulged his genius with a third drama-on a metaphysical subject, something in the style of Manfred" (Letters, 1901, v. 189). 1 Goethe's comment on reading and reviewing Cain was that he should be surprised if Byron did not pursue the treatment of such “biblical subjects," as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Conversationous spirit, and octand, many years after, he told Crabb ge beneath the dignity 435) that Byron should have lit is needless to add that nas a nust tenke personality of his own. The conception of the spirit of evil justifying an eternal antagonism to the Creator from the standpoint of a superior morality, may, perhaps, be traced to a Manichean source, but it has been touched with a new emotion. Milton's devil is an abstraction of infernal pride "Sole Positive of Night! Antipathist of Light! Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod- Goethe's devil is an abstraction of scorn. He "maketh a mock" alike of good and evil! But Byron's devil is a spirit, yet a mortal too—the traducer, because he has suffered for his sins; the deceiver, because he is self-deceived; the hoper against hope that there is a ransom for the soul in perfect self-will and not in perfect self-sacrifice. Byron did not uphold Lucifer, but he "had passed that way," and could imagine a spiritual warfare not only against the Deus of the Mysteries or of the Book of Genesis, but against what he |