Cain and the Infinite Sadness February 26, 2007
Posted by jophine in : Childe Harold, Hero , comments closedWhat type of man is Byron’s Cain in Byron’s Cain? I think, when he depicts the second man, Byron is in essence creating a simplified version of all of his heroes, including the naive Childe Harold of cantos I and II, Manfred, the giaour, and the matured Childe Harold of cantos III and IV. Cain sees the world through specific filters which all of Byron’s heroes suffer, and the most important and potent of these filters is history. Cain perceives the world through the very little human history that exists, and he absorbs what Lucifer shows him of pre-human history. Armed with the knowledge of his and the earth’s past, Cain interprets his present differently from his entire family, and ultimately chooses free will over subservience to God.
If I were writing a paper on Cain alone, that’s how I would begin it, but since this is a blog, I’ll take liberties and just let it be a space where I can clarify my thoughts. Cain, I think, is a human that is concerned not with all of human history, but with the extremes of it — the beauties of a Paradise and the despair of a fall which he did not witness, but envisions and mourns:
And this is
Life! — Toil! and wherefore should I toil? — because
My father could not keep his place in Eden.
What had I done in this? — I was unborn,
I sought not to be born; nor to love the state
To which birth has brought me.
Even before he meets Lucifer, Cain is already concerned with his own history’s greatest and worst moments. In his other heroes, Byron usually merges these. For example, though Harold (Byron) was not there for the battle of Waterloo in Canto III, he walks on the land imagining the trials his cousin endured, and considers the affects of the battle knowing the outcome rather than the process. The pain he feels, though — the loss of a cousin and the loss of Napoleon — affects him gravely. Just as Cain did not personally fall, Harold did not personally battle, and the loss is merely a response to the events he has internalized, seemingly on behalf of the dead.
Cain, however, also internalizes more distant history, which he can be told, but which he cannot understand — it is completely out of his scope of social understanding. In their grand tour of the universe, Lucifer shows Cain Hades, and Cain discovers that there were creatures inhabiting earth and cast into hell long before humans existed: dinosaurs (awesome, dinosaurs!) He absorbs this history as part of the history of Earth, and is astounded by these beasts whose size and majesty would be too great for the Earth he inhabits. Similarly, Harold cannot witness the field of Marathon without imagining the great battle that happened there in vivid — if unknown — detail, and he also sees the subsequent irreverence with which people walk on the grounds. He then perceives the modern day, ravaged version of Marathon, and can only mourn the bloodshed and glory that were once there. Because of the internalized history which he was not a part of but which nevertheless affects him, Harold, like Cain, can only despair his own position as witness without agency, helpless in the face of a higher order.
I think Cain, too, helped me to understand canto III of Childe Harold a little better. Byron frames canto III with a message to his daughter, whom he saw only when she was a baby, and whom he would never see again. Cain, though he tries to force his wife and son away, is nevertheless swayed by her unconditional love and insistence; he asks if she fears the first murderer, and she replies, “I fear / Nothing except to leave thee, much as I / Shrink from the deed which leaves thee brotherless.” Byron has only the child to leave, and so wanders alone, but like Cain has to reconcile himself with the fact that he is one of those cliched “doomed to live.” But I don’t think that either Harold or Cain (or Byron) really feel that life is their punishment, but in truth, it’s the extension of remembering history as well as witnessing the sufferring of the future. Towards the end of canto III, Harold/Byron says,
I have not loved the world, north the world me, —
But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
Though I have found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, — hopes which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful, nor weave
Snares for the failing: I would also deem
O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost what they seem–
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.
And the earlier Cain:
Oh! thou dead
And everlasting witness! whose unsinking
Blood darkens earth and heaven! what thou now art,
I know not! but if thou see’st what I am,
I think thou wilt forgive him, whom his God
Can ne’er forgive, nor his own soul. — Farewell!
At the end of both Cain and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage canto III, both heroes reconcile themselves not with the higher power, but with the events of their time. They distinguish themselves through in Harold’s case social out-casting and unique thought, and in Cain’s case crime. But each one is reconciled with his antagonist. For Cain, this is Abel whom, though he suffered under the same weight of their parents’ fall, nevertheless bows and prays to God with pure faith. For Harold, this is the world which, perceived through the lens of history, rapes itself and tortures him with irreverence for both history and nature and glory — such as that of Napoleon. Both men have to reconcile their personal histories with their internalized histories, and then make peace with the world that they witness.