Don Juan

Introduction

Byron was a rapid as well as a voluminous writer. His Tales were thrown off at lightning speed, and even his dramas were thought out and worked through with unhesitating energy and rapid achievement. Nevertheless, the composition of his two great poems was all but coextensive with his poetical life. He began the first canto of Childe Harold in the autumn of 1809, and he did not complete the fourth canto till the spring of 1818. He began the first canto of Don Juan in the autumn of 1818, and he was still at work on a seventeenth canto in the spring of 1823. Both poems were issued in parts, and with long intervals of unequal duration between the parts; but the same result was brought about by different causes and produced a dissimilar effect. Childe Harold consists of three distinct poems descriptive of three successive travels or journeys in foreign lands. The adventures of the hero are but the pretext for the shifting of the diorama; whereas in Don Juan the story is continuous, and the scenery is exhibited as a background for the dramatic evolution of the personality of the hero. Childe Harold came out at intervals, because there were periods when the author was stationary; but the interruptions in the composition and publication of Don Juan were due to the disapproval and discouragement of friends, and the very natural hesitation and procrastination of the publisher. Canto I was written in September, 1818; Canto II in December-January, 1818–1819. Both cantos were published on July 15, 1819. Cantos III, IV were written in the winter of 1819–1820; Canto V, after an interval of nine months, in October-November, 1820, but the publication of Cantos III, IV, V was delayed till August 8, 1821. The next interval was longer still, but it was the last. In June, 1822, Byron began to work at a sixth, and by the end of March, 1823, he had completed a sixteenth canto. But the publication of these later cantos, which had been declined by Murray, and were finally entrusted to John Hunt, was spread over a period of several months. Cantos VI, VII, VIII, with a Preface, were published July 15; Cantos IX, X, XI, August 29; Cantos XII, XIII, XIV, December 17, 1823; and, finally, Cantos XV, XVI, March 26, 1824. The composition of Don Juan, considered as a whole, synchronized with the composition of all the dramas (except Manfred) and the following poems: The Prophecy of Dante, (the translation of) The Morgante Maggiore, The Vision of Judgment, The Age of Bronze, and The Island.

There is little to be said with regard to the “Sources” of Don Juan. Frere’s Whistlecraft had suggested Beppo, and, at the same time, had prompted and provoked a sympathetic study of Frere’s Italian models, Berni and Pulci (see “Introduction to Beppo,” Poetical Works, 1901, IV 155–158; and “Introduction to The Morgante Maggiore” ibid., pp. 279–281); and, again, the success of Beppo, and, still more, a sense of inspiration and the conviction that he had found the path to excellence, suggested another essay of the ottava rima, a humorous poem “à la Beppo” on a larger and more important scale. If Byron possessed more than a superficial knowledge of the legendary “Don Juan,” he was irresponsive and unimpressed. He speaks (letter to Murray, February 16, 1821) of “the Spanish tradition;” but there is nothing to show that he had read or heard of Tirso de Molina’s (Gabriel Tellez) El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra (The Deceiver of Seville and the Stone Guest), 1626, which dramatized the “ower true tale” of the actual Don Juan Tenorio; or that he was acquainted with any of the Italian (e.g. Convitato di Pietra, del Dottor Giacinto Andrea Cicognini, Fiorentino [see L. Allacci Dramaturgia, 1755, 4º, p. 862]) or French adaptations of the legend (e.g. Le Festin de Pierre, ou le fils criminel, Tragi-comédie de De Villiers, 1659; and Molière’s Dom Juan, ou Le Festin de Pierre, 1665). He had seen (vide post, note 24) Delpini’s pantomime, which was based on Shadwell’s Libertine, and he may have witnessed, at Milan or Venice, a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; but in taking Don Juan for his “hero,” he took the name only, and disregarded the “terrible figure” “of the Titan of embodied evil, the likeness of sin made flesh” (see Selections from the Works of Lord Byron, by A. C. Swinburne, 1885, p. XXVI), “as something to his purpose nothing”!

Why, then, did he choose the name, and what was the scheme or motif of his poem? Something is to be gathered from his own remarks and reflections; but it must be borne in mind that he is on the defensive, and that his half-humorous paradoxes were provoked by advice and opposition. Writing to Moore (September 19, 1818), he says, “I have finished the first canto … of a poem in the style and manner of Beppo, encouraged by the good success of the same. It is … meant to be a little quietly facetious upon everything. But I doubt whether it is not—at least as far as it has gone—too free for these very modest days.” The critics before and after publication thought that Don Juan was “too free,” and, a month after the two first cantos had been issued, he writes to Murray (August 12, 1819), “You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny; I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or have materials. … You are too earnest and eager about a work never intended to be serious. Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?—a playful satire, with as little poetry as could be helped, was what I meant.” Again, after the completion but before the publication of Cantos III, IV, V, in a letter to Murray (February 16, 1821), he writes, “The Fifth is so far from being the last of Don Juan, that it is hardly the beginning. I meant to take him the tour of Europe, with a proper mixture of siege, battle, and adventure, and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots in the French Revolution. … I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy, and a cause for a divorce in England, and a Sentimental ‘Werther-faced’ man in Germany, so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of these countries, and to have displayed him gradually gâté and blasé, as he grew older, as is natural. But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest.”

Byron meant what he said, but he kept back the larger truth. Great works, in which the poet speaks ex animo, and the man lays bare the very pulse of the machine, are not conceived or composed unconsciously and at haphazard. Byron did not “whistle” Don Juan “for want of thought.” He had found a thing to say, and he meant to make the world listen. He had read with angry disapproval, but he had read, Coleridge’s Critique on [Maturin’s] Bertram (vide post, note 11), and, it may be, had caught an inspiration from one brilliant sentence which depicts the Don Juan of the legend somewhat after the likeness of Childe Harold, if not of Lord Byron: “Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, … all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and natural character, are … combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature … Obedience to nature is the only virtue.” Again, “It is not the wickedness of Don Juan … which constitutes the character an abstraction, … but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities as coexistent with entire wickedness in one and the same person.” Here was at once a suggestion and a challenge.

Would it not be possible to conceive and to depict an ideal character, gifted, gracious, and delightful, who should “carry into all its practical consequences” the doctrine of a mundane, if not godless doctrine, and, at the same time, retain the charities and virtues of uncelestial but not devilish manhood? In defiance of monition and in spite of resolution, the primrose path is trodden by all sorts and conditions of men, sinners no doubt, but not necessarily abstractions of sin, and to assert the contrary makes for cant and not for righteousness. The form and substance of the poem were due to the compulsion of Genius and the determination of Art, but the argument is a vindication of the natural man. It is Byron’s “criticism of life.” Don Juan was taboo from the first. The earlier issues of the first five cantos were doubly anonymous. Neither author nor publisher subscribed their names on the title-page. The book was a monster, and, as its maker had foreseen, “all the world” shuddered. Immoral, in the sense that it advocates immoral tenets, or prefers evil to good, it is not, but it is unquestionably a dangerous book, which (to quote Kingsley’s words used in another connection) “the young and innocent will do well to leave altogether unread.” It is dangerous because it ignores resistance and presumes submission to passion; it is dangerous because, as Byron admitted, it is “now and then voluptuous;” and it is dangerous, in a lesser degree, because, here and there, the purport of the quips and allusions is gross and offensive. No one can take up the book without being struck and arrested by these violations of modesty and decorum; but no one can master its contents and become possessed of it as a whole without perceiving that the mirror is held up to nature, that it reflects spots and blemishes which, on a survey of the vast and various orb, dwindle into natural and so comparative insignificance. Byron was under no delusion as to the grossness of Don Juan. His plea or pretence, that he was sheltered by the superior grossness of Ariosto and La Fontaine, of Prior and of Fielding, is nihil ad rem, if it is not insincere. When Murray (May 3, 1819) charges him with “approximations to indelicacy,” he laughs himself away at the euphemism, but when Hobhouse and “the Zoili of Albemarle Street” talked to him “about morality,” he flames out, “I maintain that it is the most moral of poems.” He looked upon his great work as a whole, and he knew that the “raison d’être of his song” was not only to celebrate, but, by the white light of truth, to represent and exhibit the great things of the world—Love and War, and Death by sea and land, and Man, half-angel, half-demon—the comedy of his fortunes, and the tragedy of his passions and his fate.

Don Juan has won great praise from the great. Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh Weekly Journal, May 19, 1824) maintained that its creator “has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string of the divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and heart-astounding tones.” Goethe (Kunst und Alterthum, 1821 [ed. Weimar, III 197, and Sämmtliche Werke, XIII 637]) described Don Juan as “a work of boundless genius.” Shelley (letter to Byron, October 21, 1821), on the receipt of Cantos III, IV, V, bore testimony to his “wonder and delight:” “This poem carries with it at once the stamp of originality and defiance of imitation. Nothing has ever been written like it in English, nor, if I may venture to prophesy, will there be, unless carrying upon it the mark of a secondary and borrowed light. … You are building up a drama,” he adds, “such as England has not yet seen, and the task is sufficiently noble and worthy of you.” Again, of the fifth canto he writes (Shelley’s Prose Works, ed. H. Buxton Forman, IV 219), “Every word has the stamp of immortality. … It fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached of producing—something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful.” Finally, a living poet, neither a disciple nor encomiast of Byron, pays eloquent tribute to the strength and splendour of Don Juan: “Across the stanzas … we swim forward as over the ‘broad backs of the sea;’ they break and glitter, hiss and laugh, murmur and move like waves that sound or that subside. There is in them a delicious resistance, an elastic motion, which salt water has and fresh water has not. There is about them a wide wholesome air, full of vivid light and constant wind, which is only felt at sea. Life undulates and Death palpitates in the splendid verse. … This gift of life and variety is the supreme quality of Byron’s chief poem” (A Selection, etc., by A. C. Swinburne, 1885, p. X).

Cantos I, II of Don Juan were reviewed in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August, 1819, vol. V pp. 512–518; Cantos III, IV, V, August, 1821, vol. X pp. 107–115; and Cantos VI, VII, VIII, July, 1823, vol. XIV pp. 88–92: in the British Critic, Cantos I, II were reviewed August, 1819, vol. XII pp. 195–205; and Cantos III, IV, V, September, 1821, vol. XVI pp. 251–256: in the British Review, Cantos I, II were reviewed August, 1819, vol. XIV pp. 266–268; and Cantos III, IV, V, December, 1821, vol. XVIII pp. 245–265: in the Examiner, Cantos I, II were reviewed October 31, 1819; Cantos III, IV, V, August 26, 1821; and Cantos XV, XVI, March 14 and 21, 1824: in the Literary Gazette, Cantos I, II were reviewed July 17 and 24, 1819; Cantos III, IV, V, August 11 and 18, 1821; Cantos VI, VII, VIII, July 19, 1823; Cantos IX, X, XI, September 6, 1823; Cantos XII, XIII, XIV, December 6, 1823; and Cantos XV, XVI, April 3, 1824: in the Monthly Review, Cantos I, II were reviewed July, 1819, Enlarged Series, vol. 89, p. 309; Cantos III, IV, V, August, 1821, vol. 95, p. 418; Cantos VI, VII, VIII, July, 1823, vol. 101, p. 316; Cantos IX, X, XI, October, 1823, vol. 102, p. 217; Cantos XII, XIII, XIV, vol. 103, p. 212; and Cantos XV, XVI, April, 1824, vol. 103, p. 434: in the New Monthly Magazine, Cantos I, II were reviewed August, 1819, vol. XII p. 75. See, too, an article on the “Morality of Don Juan,” Dublin University Magazine, May, 1875, vol. LXXXV pp. 630–637.

Neither the Quarterly nor the Edinburgh Review devoted separate articles to Don Juan; but Heber, in the Quarterly Review (Lord Byron’s Dramas), July, 1822, vol. XXVII p. 477, and Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review (Lord Byron’s Tragedies), February, 1822, vol. 36, pp. 446–450, took occasion to pass judgment on the poem and its author.

For the history of the legend, see History of Spanish Literature, by George Ticknor, 1888, vol. II pp. 380, 381; and Das Kloster, von J. Scheible, 1846, vol. III pp. 663–765. See, too, Notes sur le Don Juanisme, par Henri de Bruchard, Mercure de France, Avril, 1898, vol. XXVI pp. 58–73; and Don Juan, par Gustave Kahn, Revue Encyclopédique, 1898, tom. VIII pp. 326–329.

Preface to Cantos VI, VII, and VIII

The details of the siege of Ismail in two of the following cantos (i.e. the seventh and eighth) are taken from a French Work, entitled Histoire de la Nouvelle Russie.1 Some of the incidents attributed to Don Juan really occurred, particularly the circumstance of his saving the infant, which was the actual case of the late Duc de Richelieu, then a young volunteer in the Russian service, and afterward the founder and benefactor of Odessa, where his name and memory can never cease to be regarded with reverence.

In the course of these cantos, a stanza or two will be found relative to the late Marquis of Londonderry,2 but written some time before his decease. Had that person’s oligarchy died with him, they would have been suppressed; as it is, I am aware of nothing in the manner of his death or of his life to prevent the free expression of the opinions of all whom his whole existence was consumed in endeavouring to enslave. That he was an amiable man in private life, may or may not be true: but with this the public have nothing to do; and as to lamenting his death, it will be time enough when Ireland has ceased to mourn for his birth. As a minister, I, for one of millions, looked upon him as the most despotic in intention, and the weakest in intellect, that ever tyrannised over a country. It is the first time indeed since the Normans that England has been insulted by a minister (at least) who could not speak English, and that Parliament permitted itself to be dictated to in the language of Mrs. Malaprop.

Of the manner of his death little need be said, except that if a poor radical, such as Waddington or Watson,3 had cut his throat, he would have been buried in a crossroad, with the usual appurtenances of the stake and mallet. But the minister was an elegant lunatic—a sentimental suicide—he merely cut the “carotid artery,” (blessings on their learning!) and lo! the pageant, and the Abbey! and “the syllables of dolour yelled forth”4 by the newspapers—and the harangue of the Coroner in a eulogy over the bleeding body of the deceased—(an Anthony worthy of such a Caesar)—and the nauseous and atrocious cant of a degraded crew of conspirators against all that is sincere and honourable. In his death he was necessarily one of two things by the law5—a felon or a madman—and in either case no great subject for panegyric.6 In his life he was—what all the world knows, and half of it will feel for years to come, unless his death prove a “moral lesson” to the surviving Sejani7 of Europe. It may at least serve as some consolation to the nations, that their oppressors are not happy, and in some instances judge so justly of their own actions as to anticipate the sentence of mankind. Let us hear no more of this man; and let Ireland remove the ashes of her Grattan from the sanctuary of Westminster. Shall the patriot of humanity repose by the Werther of politics!!!

With regard to the objections which have been made on another score to the already published cantos of this poem, I shall content myself with two quotations from Voltaire:—“La pudeur s’est enfuite des coeurs, et s’est refugiée sur les lèvres.” … “Plus les moeurs sont dépravés, plus les expressions deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu’on a perdu en vertu.”

This is the real fact, as applicable to the degraded and hypocritical mass which leavens the present English generation, and is the only answer they deserve. The hackneyed and lavished title of Blasphemer—which, with Radical, Liberal, Jacobin, Reformer, etc., are the changes which the hirelings are daily ringing in the ears of those who will listen—should be welcome to all who recollect on whom it was originally bestowed. Socrates and Jesus Christ were put to death publicly as blasphemers, and so have been and may be many who dare to oppose the most notorious abuses of the name of God and the mind of man. But persecution is not refutation, nor even triumph: the “wretched infidel,” as he is called, is probably happier in his prison than the proudest of his assailants. With his opinions I have nothing to do—they may be right or wrong—but he has suffered for them, and that very suffering for conscience’ sake will make more proselytes to deism than the example of heterodox8 Prelates to Christianity, suicide statesmen to oppression, or overpensioned homicides to the impious alliance which insults the world with the name of “Holy!”9 I have no wish to trample on the dishonoured or the dead; but it would be well if the adherents to the classes from whence those persons sprung should abate a little of the cant which is the crying sin of this double-dealing and false-speaking time of selfish spoilers, and—but enough for the present.

“Difficile est proprie communia dicere.”

Hor. Epist. ad Pison.

“Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more Cakes and Ale? Yes, by St. Ann; and Ginger shall be hot in the mouth too.”

Shakespeare

Fragment on the Back of the MS. of Canto I

I would to Heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling—
Because at least the past were passed away,
And for the future—(but I write this reeling,
Having got drunk exceedingly to-day,
So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)
I say—the future is a serious matter—
And so—for God’s sake—hock and soda-water!

Dedication10