The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary

Notes

189 s noTes Chapter 1 1 Keats to Shelley, 16 August 1820, in The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:322–23. 2 See Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 2, canto 7, sts. 24–28. 3 Keats to Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, Letters, 1:386–87 (spelling modernized). 4 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 634. 5 Blake: The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Pearson /Longman, 2007), 124; Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–1993), vol. 5: Don Juan, xv.22. 6 See in particular A’s essay “Rotation of Crops”: Søren Kierkegaard, Either/ Or, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), part I, 281–300. 7 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, part I, 70. 8 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, part I, 100–101. I do not consider here the adequacy of A’s account of Don Giovanni, though this is both tenable and powerful. Bernard Williams’ thoughtful reflections on it (“Don Giovanni as an Idea,” in W. A. Mozart, Don Giovanni, ed. Julian Rushton [Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1981]) effectively endorse its view of Giovanni as “the life principle . . . energy in action, unselfconsciousness ” and acknowledge as problematic the question of whether there is s 190 Notes to pp. 4–8 “anything left to the idea of an order against which he is to be judged” (85). In The Roots of Romanticism (London: Pimlico, 2000), Isaiah Berlin took the nineteenth-century excision of the opera’s final sextet to epitomize Romanticism’s rejection of fixed or given truth structures in favor of allegiance to the ever-onward, insatiable will and the larger-than-life mythmaking which the Romantic attitude fosters. According to the Romantic view, “here is this vast, dominating, sinister symbolic figure, Don Giovanni, who stands for we know not what, but certainly for something inexpressible. He stands, perhaps, for art against life, for some principle of inexhaustible evil against some kind of philistine good; he stands for power, for magic . . . and then suddenly this philistine little sextet follows, in which the characters simply sing peacefully about the fact that a rake has been punished, and good men will continue their ordinary, perfectly peaceful lives thereafter. This was regarded as inartistic, shallow , bathetic and disgusting, and therefore eliminated” (123). A’s account of Don Giovanni is, perhaps, inadequate in proportion as it is unable to accommodate the qualities of comic irony in the opera with which the final sextet connects. 9 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, part I, 64–65. 10 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 235, slightly altered. 11 Mann, Faustus, 230. 12 John Berger, G. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985), 133. 13 Mann, Faustus, 150. 14 Mann, Faustus, 235–36, slightly altered. 15 Mann, Faustus, 222. 16 Mann, Faustus, 158. 17 Mann, Faustus, 131–12 (emphasis in original). 18 Mann, Faustus, 231–32. The first phrase is altered. 19 Mann, Faustus, 232. 20 Mann, Faustus, 235. 21 Mann, Faustus, 231, slightly altered. This draws on a passage in Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche describes the state of inspiration in which Zarathustra was composed. In an essay on Nietzsche, Mann praises the passage as a stylistic masterpiece, while also seeing in it the overstimulation of syphilis and commenting that Nietzsche overestimated the merits of Zarathustra. Thomas Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Recent History,” in Last Essays, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston (London: Secker & Warburg , 1959), 147–48. s Notes to pp. 9–15 191 22 Mann, Faustus, 61, slightly altered. 23 Mann, Faustus, 359. 24 Mann, Faustus, 361. 25 Mann, Faustus, 359. 26 Mann, Faustus, 364. 27 Mann, Faustus, 364, slightly altered. 28 Mann’s late essay “Nietzsche’s Philosophy” recounts the brothel anecdote and Nietzsche’s subsequent contraction—“some say deliberately”—of syphilis, the disease which is another name for Nietzsche’s “genius” (144– 45). The essay is full of the themes of the novel. “Culture for Nietzsche is the aristocracy of life; and linked with it, as its sources and prerequisites, are art and instinct, whereas the mortal enemies and destroyers of culture and life...