Page 13 - GALIET EMPATHY and Byron´s Hero IV

But being met is deadly, -- such hath been The course of my existence...”
(Manfred, III, 125-33)
“Our idea of the soul of man is so great,” says Pascal, “that we cannot endure being despised or not esteemed by any soul; for all the happiness of men consists in this esteem.”16 It is Manfred’s isolation and his tragic tension between the ideal and real, self and others, height and abyss that cause his ‘barrenness of spirit.’ Restless, yet secure in Childe Harold’s reserved coldness,17 bitter and spiteful Manfred hoards carcasses and wrecks, demoting social action for inaction, dreams of philanthropy for misanthropy. Manfred’s self-contradictions and infinite multiplicities 3⁄4 schisms between his nature and his will 3⁄4 mirror classicism’s18 and modernity’s rift between being for others and being for oneself.
“Aye – Father! I have had those early visions, And noble aspirations in my youth,
To make my own the mind of other men, The enlightener of nations; and to rise
I knew not whither – it might be to fall;
But fall, even as the mountain-cataract,
Which having leapt from its more dazzling height, Even in the foaming strength of its abyss,
16 Pascal. Pensees. Section VI. Aphorism 400. 240. Pascal. Pensees. The Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.Vol. 33. London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.
17 Childe Harold. III.82. Heath, William. Major British Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1973.
18 These phusis-nomos tensions are exemplified in Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.
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