Cain: Lord Byron's Sincerity‪.‬

BYRON'S 1821 CAIN: A MYSTERY ASKS SOME OBVIOUS AND IMPORTANT questions. At least, they are obvious and important if one takes the book of Genesis literally, as some of his readers then did, and a few still do. Why are the children of Adam and Eve condemned to die for sins they didn't commit? Wouldn't they have resented that? If Adam and Eve were the first people, who could their sons marry except their own sisters? (Was that all right, then? Why isn't it now?) Why did God reject Cain's offering? Why does God like animals being killed for sacrifice anyway? And was it really necessary for everybody to suffer, when God could prevent it? Why should knowledge be forbidden, really? It is possible to imagine, that is, that such questions might be disarming, or even liberating, for certain readers, confronting as they do gnawing problems these readers have been unable or unwilling ever to put into words. Such readers are not offended, exactly. Byron, for them, is a surrogate, an ally, almost a priest of a kind, mediating their experience of the increasingly troubling mysteries of their sacred book. (1) But for a range of fairly obvious reasons, amongst them embarrassment and the very inarticulateness that Byron was assuaging, these readers tend to be fairly quiet. To believers with a somewhat more figurative idea of their Bible, however, to be this obvious is to be naive, irksomely or suspiciously so. In a child, such queries might be endearing or irritating. In an intellectual-especially the author of such poems as Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement--one suspects irony, sarcasm, disingenuousness. Or a lapse into (or revelation of) culpable stupidity. From publication to the present the poem has often been characterized, by the relatively sophisticated, as a crude or wicked or calculating provocation, a "blundering frontal assault" on orthodoxy (2) or a mischievous taunt at belief with "nothing behind it other than a rather frivolous impulse to be offensive." (3) These readers are considerably more voluble. They feel they can see through Byron's game. They are the ones--they feel--to whom offense is really intended. (Although this too is different from being offended, exactly.)