All we have to say is, that Lord Byron’s conduct in this respect is exactly what might have been expected if he had a crime on his conscience.
The energy of remorse and despair expressed in ‘Manfred’ were so appalling and so vividly personal, that the belief was universal on the Continent that the experience was wrought out of some actual crime. Goethe expressed this idea, and had heard a murder imputed to Byron as the cause.
The allusion to the crime and consequences of incest is so plain in ‘Manfred,’ that it is astonishing that any one can pretend, as Galt does, that it had any other application.
The hero speaks of the love between himself and the imaginary being whose spirit haunts him as having been the deadliest sin, and one that has, perhaps, caused her eternal destruction.
‘What is she now? A sufferer for my sins;
A thing I dare not think upon.’
He speaks of her blood as haunting him, and as being
‘My blood,—the pure, warm stream
That ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours
When we were in our youth, and had one heart,
And loved each other as we should not love.’
This work was conceived in the commotion of mind immediately following his separation. The scenery of it was sketched in a journal sent to his sister at the time.
In letter 377, defending the originality of the conception, and showing that it did not arise from reading ‘Faust,’ he says,—
‘It was the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, more than Faustus, that made me write “Manfred.”’