Introduction

16
And half mistook for fate the acts of will:
Too high for common selfishness, he could,
At times resign his own or other’s good,
But not in pity, not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That sways him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
At this same impulse would in tempting time
Mislead his equally to crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sunk beneath,
And lodged by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state …
‘Tis true, with other men their path he walked,
And like the rest in seeming did and talked,
Nor outraged Reason’s rules by flaw nor start,
His madness was not of the head, but heart;
And rarely wandered in his speech, or drew
His thoughts so forth as to offend the view. (l. 313-348, 355-362)
Vanessa Mangione
The Byronic hero is here demonstrated as a mourning but simultaneously defiant
man, whose characteristics as “fallen angel” are emphasised with a specific reference
to Milton’s Satan (“an erring spirit from another hurled”, l. 316). He has
already been made cynical through occurrences outside his control and through
the vice of man. He is haunted by a sense of crime, real or imagined.
In English Romantic Writers, Perkins characterises the concept of the Byronic
hero as follows
The “Byronic Hero” [is] first portrayed in Cantos I and II of Childe Harold
and thereafter developed variously in The Corsair, Lara, Childe Harold III and
IV, Manfred and Cain. The figure had prototypes in the Gothic novels of the
eighteenth century, in Chateaubriand’s Réné and in the characters of Milton’s
Satan and of Napoleon as seen through Romantic eyes. The Byronic
Hero continued to haunt nineteenth-century literature and philosophy. He
is a man greater than others in emotion, capability, and suffering. Only
among wild and vast forms of nature – the ocean, the precipices and glaciers
of the Alps – can he find a counterpart for his own titanic passions.
Driven by a demon within, he is fatal to himself and others, for no one can
resist his hypnotic fascination and authority. He has committed a sin that itself
expresses his superiority: lesser men could not even conceive a like
transgression. Against his own suffering he brings to bear a superhuman
pride and fortitude. Indeed, without the horror of his fate there could not