Now Mazzini on Byron and Goethe

Day Five.

He says
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earthly life being but one stage of the eternal evolution of life, manifested in thought and action; strengthened by all the achievements of the past, and advancing from age to ages towards a less imperfect expression of that idea."

and sees both poets as 'summing up' the end of a long era of individuality which began with the Greeks, was carried by the Christianity [seen I think as a cult of the Divine made individual], and which found it's death throes during the Napoleonic age, where -

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The political schools of the epoch had proclaimed the sole basis of civil organization to be the right to liberty and equality (liberty for all), but they had encountered social anarchy by the way. The philosophy of the epoch had asserted the sovereignty of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere adoration of fact, in Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the epoch imagined it had organized free competition, while it had but organized the oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of poverty by wealth. The Poetry of the epoch had represented individuality in its every phase; had translated in sentiment what science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had encountered the void. But as society at last discovered that the destinies of the race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in the harmonization of liberty with association—so did poetry discover that the life it had hitherto drawn from individuality alone was doomed to perish for want of aliment; and that its future existence depended on enlarging and transforming its sphere."


When he speaks of Byron, I am reminded of Peter Ackroyd on the Romantic poets
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/intro.shtml
With Byron began the cult of the individual poet, the first pop star, where the events of his life were of at least equal interest to his works. Yet Mazzini highlights Byron and his heros as individuals standing alone, wanting to find inspiration and purpose within and around, but haunting a landscape in which the time of the individual is already passed, just as the time of aristocracy has passed too..
Byron then is seen as the late flower of a fading age.
I would see a echo of this in the closing words of Shelly's Frankenstein. Prometheus is unbound, the superman is come, but must exile himself as a monster.

If Byron is subjective mind, and Ego, Goethe is objective mind who "has felt everything but he has never felt the whole."
Mazzini says of him -
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He witnessed the French Revolution in all its terrible grandeur, and saw the old world crumble beneath its strokes; and while all the best and purest spirits of Germany, who had mistaken the death-agony of the old world for the birth-throes of a new, were wringing their hands at the spectacle of dissolution, he saw in it only the subject of a farce. He beheld the glory and the fall of Napoleon; he witnessed the reaction of down-trodden nationalities—sublime prologue of the grand epopee of the peoples destined sooner or later to be unfolded—and remained a cold spectator. He had neither learned to esteem men, to better them, nor even to suffer with them."

Perhaps Goethe as represented here prefigures the camera, the documentary; taking in all and rendering faithfully, yet without being moved by what he sees.

We read -
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When travelling in that second fatherland of all poetic souls—Italy—the poets still pursued divergent routes; the one experienced sensations; the other emotions; the one occupied himself especially with nature; the other with the greatness dead, the living wrongs, the human memories.
Goethe, the poet of individuality in its objective life—at the egotism of indifference; Byron—the poet of individuality in its subjective life—at the egotism (I say it with regret, but it, too, it egotism) of despair:"


So Goethe here is the observing ego, the analytic mind wishing to quantify and represent in terms of form, Byron the feelings and emotions, the passionate individual ego, feeling the inner life, sensing the whole, searching for meaning and purpose.
We might call the duality that Maxxini sees expressed in these two poets as concrete and abstract mind, thought and feelings, left and right brain, ego and soul, fact and fancy, matchstick man and space cadet, rationality and passion.

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While Goethe held himself all of from us, and from the height of his Olympian calm seemed to smile with disdain at our desires, our struggles, and our sufferings—Byron wandered through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet; wounded, and bearing the arrow in the wound."

Or sometimes, flew like a hawk above.

Mazzini seems to be unsure if the European revolutions signalled a beginning as well as an end, but suggestes a new age of individuality alongside cooperation could replace the simple tyranny of wealth and faceless government.

Has that happened? Do we have both?

Is there any reality to Mazzini's view, or does he use the two poets to typify aspects of himself, using his own vision of history as a backdrop?

A very good point made by David Welch - "I like how he echoed them in relation to history and Italy. In the world one reads history from outside looking in, except in Italy where it is seen from the inside looking out. He seemed to me to be saying Goethe's Poetry was on life from the outside looking in, and Byron's poetry was life from the inside looking out. I thought that was much stronger than his analogy to the birds."

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Looking at Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, from the Wiki -

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Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative poem written by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron when at Kinsham. It was published between 1812 and 1818. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands; in a wider sense, it is an expression of the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. The title comes from the term childe, a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.

The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his travels through the Mediterranean and Aegean Sea between 1809 and 1811. Despite Byron's personal distates for the poem, which he felt revealed too much of himself, it was well-received by critic John Murray and brought him a large amount of public attention. Byron stated that he woke up one day and "found myself famous.".

The work provided the first example of the Byronic hero[citation needed], which has appeared innovels, films and plays ever since.

The poem has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consists of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and has rhyme pattern ABABBCBCC.

Childe Harold became a vehicle for Byron's own beliefs and ideas; indeed in the preface to book three Byron acknowledges the fact that his hero is just an extension of himself. According to Jerome McGann, by masking himself behind a literary artifice, Byron was able to express his view that "man's greatest tragedy is that he can conceive of a perfection which he cannot attain".

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7086/chpindex.htm

I much prefer this to Milton. The Spenserian stanza is a good cross country form for the long haul, I think.