During the past twenty years, since the centenary of Byron's death at Missolonghi in 1824, interest in his poetry and appreciation of his titanic role in romanticism have been steadily increasing. The pertinence and power of what Byron has to say to our generation, living through an era startlingly like his own, have given new lustre to his reputation.
Of all his vast poetic production, Don Juan, the last and greatest of his major works, offers the highest rewards to the modern reader. It not only stands out among his poems as the best expression of Byron, but it ranks with the great poems of the nineteenth century-Goethe's Faust, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Wordsworth's Prelude, to name only a few-as representative of the era, and of modern European civilization.
For many reasons, there has been less critical exposition of Don Juan than so important a poem deserves. Critics, biographers, and public interest have been so overwhelmingly fascinated with the enigmatic character of Byron himself, full of contradictions and paradox, and with the dramatic story of his life, that consideration of his poetry is often approached almost as an after-thought. Don Juan especially has been overlooked. It is apparently simple and lucid, it is long and leisurely, it comes at the end of Byron's career, and it is filled with irony-reasons sufficient in themselves to cause its comparative neglect. Moreover, it is a fragment and therefore less attractive for appraisal than the completed Childe Harold. Don Juan got off to a bad critical start by being published in parts and was made the object of hostile criticism from the moment of its appearance. An aura of traditional suspicion still clings to it in the popular mind.
Lord Ernie, the editor of Byron's letters and journals, in an article in The Quarterly Review (April 1924) occasioned by the publication of Samuel C. Chew's Byron in England and H. J. C. Grierson's edition of Byron's poems, sums up what is the real mystery of Byron -the hidden creative life of the poet about whom far too many of the outward details are known. For as Lord Ernie says, neither the life story, nor the observations of people like Lady Blessington, nor Byron's letters, self-revealing as they are, can explain the poet: "Judgments founded on such external evidence fail to account for the energy, industry, concentration, and effort that are involved in the production of a vast and varied mass of poetry, none perhaps without flaw, but none, as his bitterest critic added, without value. ... It is on such points as these that the omission of his intellectual occupations fropi his full and intimate corv 4 BYRON'S DON JUAN
ing to understand it. For Byron, who had been subject to many influences oppressive to his natural talents and had written from many other motives than sheer self-expression, gained his liberty gradually through experiences which had much to do in shaping and determining what his freest expression would be. Suspending for a while, therefore, the consideration of Don Juan itself, I shall begin with the externalities of Byron's career in relation to the making of Don Juan, in order that the reader may be reminded afresh of the setting or environment of this work.
Perhaps it is necessary to emphasize that Byron's career as a poet was professional. His activity in the spheres of politics and society was so spectacular as to subordinate, even for his contemporaries, his vast production as a poet. He himself cultivated the legend of his amateur Noble-Author status, careless of public opinion. He wrote very rapidly, corrected only in proof, if at all, and appeared to do everything literary in a most spontaneous fashion. He felt and expressed a contempt for the professional author -"the pen peeping from behind the ear, and the thumbs a little inky, or so." Nevertheless, his letters and journals show that his concern for poetic supremacy and fame was consistently deep and serious. Though he wrote rapidly, he relied upon the dictation of memory, for he composed his verse in his head and brooded over most of his subjects for a long time before they took shape. Independent as he was in his attitude toward public and critics, he nevertheless took care always to keep a weather-eye on the barometer of sales. 1 Byron acknowledged his professional status, even to himself, only at last and reluctantly. Ambition for power and popularity came first and remained always the principal reason for writing. This was supplemented by the "rage, resistance, and redress," which followed the Edinburgh Review article on Hours of Idleness, and all the other snubs that life so often awarded him. Finally, after Byron had accepted his disbarment from any other career than authorship, he looked to the rewards of money. He may have been generous toward the rivalry of Moore and Scott and a few other poets, and have made disparaging remarks about those who could "bear no brother near the throne," but he was certainly not detached nor unconcerned about his own success, and wanted above everything to be First. He used Murray, the "Synod" -Murray's literary advisers -and every straw in the wind to indicate the way to success. He compromised as well as he could between his natural talents and the advice of critics and demands of the public.
The first critical guidance was no light touch, but a humiliating lashing that would have silenced forever any "minor" poet less pugnacious "AGAINST THE WIND" S than Byron. "The poesy of this young lord," wrote the anonymous pen in the Edinburgh Review, January 1808, "belongs to the class which neither gods nor men are said to permit." Thus the reviewer described Byron's effusions of sentiment and humor in Hours of Idleness, written in imitation of Ossian, Moore, Catullus, Horace, etc. In fact, the reviewer continued, they are flat and stagnant, and not to be excused or ameliorated by the plea of youth, for look at the excellent poems of the twelve-year-old Pope. Poetry should have "a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy" -"must contain at least one thought" a little different from other writers. Imitations of what other poets have done better, for instance, of Gray's Ode on the Prospect of Eton, and of Rogers' On a Tear, are to be condemned; so also are translations, neither Accurate nor concise, but only diffuse approximations. The imitation of Macpherson is so close as to be indistinguishable from borrowing, and Macpherson is "stupid and tiresome" anyway. The reviewer poured his severest sarcasm on Byron's efforts at satire on the Cambridge University curriculum and chapel choir, and concluded with ironic gratitude for what the poet had granted to the world, since it was to be the last volume from his pen.
Though Byron never forgave the writer, he learned his lesson well from that review, especially the pleas for liveliness, originality, and accuracy in poetry, and the repudiation of cloudy romanticism. He did indeed look at the poetry of Pope, and extricated himself as fast as possible from the company of insipid romantic poetasters, producing his first great success in satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, under the aegis of Pope and Gifford. Though he was not to reap the literary benefits until later, this satire aligned him with Gifford, Frere and Canning, and the Tory Quarterly Reviewers, and, as far as literary party was concerned, alienated him from the Whigs, the romantics, and the revolutionaries.
Yet all the while he maintained his original fondness for romantic verse and fiction, for gloom and metaphysics, and eventually for Whigs, Jeffrey, Moore, Hobhouse, Hunt, Shelley, and radical and romantic principles. He took his seat in the House of Lords on the opposition benches, and then left the country for two years of travel. When he returned he found himself once more helpless and confused between the great grinding machines of literary and political parties. No wonder he was afraid to come out with the romantic Childe Harold, and was in an agony of alarm over Murray's submitting it to Gifford and Frere before its publication. No wonder its astonishing success and the praise from all quarters bewildered him, made him feel himself and his talent unique, and bred in him contempt for a popular and critical taste, so illogical and so unpredictable. Murray became the only guide, because he tended always strictly to business, to what would sell; and Gifford, Murray's principal literary adviser, was the oracle.
Surrounded already by a nimbus of fashion, Byron was drawn into the Murray circle, the youngest, greenest, and most unaccountable of Murray's authors. According to Dallas, Murray said he was sorry that English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had not been brought to him for publication. One may well believe it, since 1809, the year of its appearance, saw the first number of the Quarterly Review, Murray's new paper to support Tory principles and oppose the Edinburgh's "disgusting" revolutionary doctrines. The Quarterly was also to give an outlet to many people, from Scott down, who had been offended like Byron by savage attacks upon their works in the Edinburgh. Byron, they felt, would have belonged with them from the start, but better late than never. Yet when he did come in with them in the spring of 1812, his maiden speech in the House of Lords and his new friendship with the Hollands had committed him politically to the Whigs, and he was therefore to be kept in Murray's drawing room as a strictly literary find.
For in literary matters Murray and his friends were comparatively mild and tolerant; they even invited Hunt to write for the Quarterly, and Mrs. Inchbald, and others of republican persuasion. The atmosphere of Murray's drawing room above the book-shop was that of a literary club and rendezvous for authors. Every "morning" -that is, from three to five in the afternoon =-• Murray received whoever wanted to drop in, and here Byron met Scott for the first time, and was in daily contact with Murray's other visitors, a widely representative group: Stratford Canning, Frere, Mackintosh, Southey, Campbell, Mme. de Staël, Gifford, Croker and Barrow of the Admiralty, James Boswell the younger, Sotheby, Robert Wilmot, Richard Heber, Sir John Malcolm, who had traveled in India and Persia, W. S. Rose, whom Byron met again in Italy, Malthus, James Mill, Rogers, Moore, and Hoppner the painter. In contemporary lists of the celebrities one might encounter there, it is amusing to find Lord Byron's name usually last. He had arrived, he was a nine-days' wonder, but he was the least of the lions in these distinguished gatherings. Gifford was the dean, the Elisha to Pope's Elijah. The great satirical successes of The Baviad, The Maeviad, and the Anti-Jacobin hung over him. Isaac D'Israeli, Frere, and Canning formed with Gifford an inner circle of satire and neo-classicism. But the circle was very broad and representative around this conservative core. Scott, with his balladry and antiquarianism, supported the new interest in history. Mme. de Staël, that enthusiastic talker, provided a high strain of romantic sentiment, with her "expert knowledge of the human heart." Her new book on Germany and her advice to "stick to the East" as the best poetical pol-JO BYRON'S DON JUAN God grant me some judgement! to do what may be most fitting in that and every thing else, for I doubt my own exceedingly." The recurrence of emphasis in these passages on intellect, judgment, and sense is interesting proof of the shift in Byron's attention from the emotional to the intellectual. He was ripening for a return to satire. This letter was written on September 15, 1817, and on the twentyfirst, Hobhouse, who was still visiting Byron in Venice, records that he "went out in gondola with Lord Kinnaird and Lord Byron to the gardens. Lord Kinnaird read to me a new poem of [John Hookham] Frere's, excellent and quizzical -no better since the days of Swift." 8 This was the Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work "by the brothers Whistlecraft," in the Pulcian ottava rima, "intended to comprise the most interesting particulars relating to King Arthur and his Round Table." Byron's prayers were answered, at least as far as style was concerned; the colloquial verve and gaiety of Frere's verses set a new tune ringing in his head, and he proceeded immediately to the composition of Beppo, which he shipped to Murray with Canto IV of Childe Harold in Hobhouse's portmanteaux, January 1818. The autumn of 1817 and the composition of Beppo marked a climax and the beginning of a new era in Byron's career. It was not only that his feeling of having come to the end of his rope coincided with his return to the school of Pope and satire, nor that in Whistlecraft he found a new style and manner; for Whistlecraft was but the last in a long series of hints from Murray and his circle and of tentative directions from Byron's experiences, which suggested the new material he needed to match the new style. In May 1816, Murray had shown Byron's verses A Sketch, in heroic couplet, to Rogers, Frere, and Stratford Canning, and reported to Byron that "they agree that you have produced nothing better; that satire is your forte. . . ." 9 In Milan, at the performance of the famous Sgricci, Byron was introduced to the art of the improvvisatore, about which he had already heard in Geneva. At Venice, the gondoliers sang stanzas from Tasso, and Byron's attention was turned again to Berni and Ariosto. He saw Goldoni's rational, realistic comedies. He heard the popular cantastorie in the piazza of St. Mark. He read the gay colloquial verse, satirizing Venetian politics and manners, by the censored Pietro Buratti, and he "got by heart" the Novelle in ottava rima by the Abate Casti. Shelley wrote Byron from Bath a challenge to produce a great work -perhaps an epic -perhaps on the theme of the French Revolution. At the same time, January 1817, Murray began to bombard him with requests for a work in prose and for more stories. Murray had been delighted with Byron's letters, increasingly rich The Memoirs, -those famous memoirs that were composed by Byron 1818-21, given to Moore, and burned directly after Byron's death, appear to have had a novel-like quality. "The amusing account given of some of the company [at Lady Jersey's farewell assembly for Byron in London, April 1816] ... of the various and characteristic ways in which the temperature of their manner towards him was affected by the cloud under which he now appeared -was one of the passages of that Memoir it would have been most desirable, perhaps, to have preserved." 15 Peter Quennell conjectures that the composition of the Memoirs at the same time as Don Juan may have fortified Byron's opinions and clarified his experiences, and that Don Juan is therefore, "so to speak, only an essential residue" of the material of the Memoirs. 16 But to return to the winter of 1817-1818 and Beppo, which was the response to Murray's appeal for a Venetian tale exhibiting Italian manners in contrast with British. Murray continued his demands for a work in prose, and between the urgings of both Murray and the Venetian circle of friends that Byron should become an interpreter of Italy to England and of England to Italy, the idea was dinned relentlessly into Byron's head. Hobhouse joined the campaign, writing to Murray after Beppo was finished that he should foster the idea of a work describing Italy, not in guidebook style, but "by subjects -literature, antiquities, manners, politics, &c." For a while Byron and Hobhouse planned to compose a joint work, based on the suggestions in Hobhouse's notes to ChUde Harold, Canto IV.
Byron, however, was not to be bogged down in any remorselessly prosaic work. The all-important question was whether Beppo would succeed with the public. He had found in it a style as near prose as poetry can be, a style that suited him exactly, in which he could speak in his natural voice, as if he were writing a letter, witty, gay, satiric. It furnished him as a storyteller with room for both dramatic characterization and action, and also subjective confessions and comments. Nevertheless, Beppo was to be published anonymously, as a trial balloon; "that kind of writing . . . suits our language, too, very well," but "we shall see by the experiment. If it does, I'll send you a volume in a year or two, for I know the Italian way of life well, and in time may know it yet better. . .
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The reception of Beppo in Murray's circle was instantly favorable. Frere, who had to be persuaded that it was not by W. S. Rose, was generously delighted and compared Byron's "protean talent," with fulsome yet subtle flattery, to that of Shakespeare. Scott, who was to review Beppo along with Whistlecraft and Rose's Court of Beasts, was equally diverted. But Byron was right in mistrusting the public's ability to see through fun and absurdity in this new style. Frere had had difficulties on Incidentally, the four stanzas following the description of Newstead with its gently humorous close, form a delightful burlesque of "naturepoetry" like Keats's Ode to Autumn.
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