In the period between 1818 and 1823 Byron wrote _Don Juan_.
Immediately after the first part of the manuscript reached England,
he was inundated by communications from friends and critics who had
been allowed to see it--expressions of consternation, entreaties
to omit this or that, deprecations of the immorality of the poem.
Immorality!--that was the cry Byron had to hear at each step of his
life, and which pursued him after death; their immorality was made the
pretext for burning his memoirs, and his immorality the pretext for
refusing his statue a place in Westminster Abbey. Byron replies in a
letter to Murray: "If they had told me the poetry was bad, I would
have acquiesced; but they say the contrary, and then talk to me about
morality--the first time I ever heard the word from anybody who was
not a rascal that used it for a purpose. I maintain that it is the
most moral of poems; but if people won't discover the moral, that is
their fault, not mine ... I will have none of your damned cutting and
slashing. If you please you may publish _anonymously_; it will perhaps
be better; but I will battle my way against them all, like a porcupine."
This poem, which, with its savage dedication to Southey, had to be
published, not only anonymously, but actually without any publisher's
name on the title-page, and which, as Byron said, had more difficulty
in making its way into an English drawing-room than a camel in passing
through the eye of a needle, is the one poem of the nineteenth century
which can be compared with Goethe's _Faust_; for it, and not the
comparatively insignificant _Manfred_, is Byron's poem of universal
humanity. Its defiant motto is the famous speech in _Twelfth Night_:
"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more
cakes and ale? Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the
mouth, too!"--a motto which promises nothing but offence and satiric
pleasantry. Nevertheless it was with justifiable and prophetic pride
that Byron said to Medwin: "If you must have an epic, there's _Don
Juan_ for you; it is an epic as much in the spirit of our day as
the _Iliad_ was in that of Homer." It was Byron who produced what
Chateaubriand imagined he had produced in _Les Martyrs_, namely,
the modern epic poem--which it was not possible to construct, as
Chateaubriand had attempted to do, on a Christian-Romantic basis, or
as Scott had thought it might be done, on the foundation of national
history and manners. Byron succeeded because he took as his foundation
nothing less than the most advanced civilisation of the century.
Juan is no Romantic hero; neither his mind nor his character raises
him much above the average; but he is a favourite of fortune, an
exceptionally handsome, proud, bold, lucky man, who is led more by his
destiny than by intention or plan--the proper hero for a poem which is
to embrace the whole of human life. It would never have done for him to
have any special province; for, from the very beginning, there was no
limit set to the scope and reach of the work.
The poem rises and falls like a ship borne upon sunlit and storm-tossed
billows; it passes from one extreme to another. On the ardent
love-scenes between Juan and Julia follows the shipwreck, with its
horrors of starvation and its death agonies; on the shipwreck follows
the splendid and melting harmony of youthful love--that highest,
freest, sweetest happiness of life. Juan and Haidée are a study of
the nude, as beautiful as an animate Amor and Psyche; above them the
moonlit sky of Greece; in front of them the wine-coloured sea--the
melodious lapping of its waves, the accompaniment of their words
of love; around them the enchanting atmosphere of Greece; at their
feet all the splendour of the East--scarlet and gold, crystal and
marble. All this had followed upon peril and suffering; and now, upon
the festival in Haidée's palace, follows such agony for Haidée that
her heart breaks, and, as Juan's lot, a sabre gash on the forehead,
crushing fetters, and sale as a slave. But it is to a seraglio he is
sold, and presently we have the droll episode of his introduction,
disguised as a girl, to the favourite sultana, and the mischievous
night scene, with all its fire and fragrance, all its merry and
voluptuous fun. Straight from this we are taken to the assault of
Ismail--to human slaughter on the hugest scale, and to all the cruelty
of a reckless war, carried on by a brutal soldiery--the whole described
with more power and at greater length than any similar episode had been
before in the poetry of any country. We next find Juan at the court of
Catherine of Russia, among the "polished boors" of Eastern Europe, who
are ruled by a gifted Messalina; and thence we follow him to England,
the promised land of highway robbery, of morality, of the power of
birth and wealth, of marriage, of virtue, and of hypocrisy.
This rough outline merely suffices to convey an idea of the capacious
proportions of the poem. Not only does it contain, in extraordinary
variety, representations of the strange contradictions in human life,
but each of these contradictions is followed out to its extremest
development. In each case the sounding-lead of the poet's imagination
has been let down to the bottom, both in the psychological and in the
external, tangible situation. Goethe's antique temperament inclined
him, wherever it was possible, to moderation; even in _Faust_, where,
in terrible earnest, he lifts the veil from human life, he lifts
it with a careful hand. But the result of this moderation is often
a deficiency in the highest potency of life. In Goethe's works the
geniuses of life and death are seldom allowed unlimited space in which
to spread their giant wings. Byron has never the desire to tranquillise
his reader, never thinks of sparing him. He himself is not calm until
he has said everything there is to say; he is a mortal enemy of the
idealism which beautifies by selecting this, rejecting that; his art
consists in pointing to reality and nature, and crying to the reader:
Know these!
Take any one of his characters--take Julia, for instance. She is
twenty-three; she is charming; almost without being aware of it, she
is a little in love with Juan; she is contented with her husband of
fifty, but also, almost unconsciously, has a faint wish that he could
be divided into two of five-and-twenty. After a hard struggle to
remain virtuous she gives way; but for a time there is nothing base
or comical in the relations of the lovers. Then Byron shows her to us
in a difficult position; the pair are surprised by the husband; and
all at once we discover a new stratum of her nature--she lies, she
deceives, she acts a part with astounding facility. She was not, then,
good and amiable, as she at first appeared to be? We were mistaken?
Not at all. Byron shows us yet another deeper-lying stratum of her
soul, in the famous farewell letter she writes to Juan, an effusion
of sincere womanly feeling, one of the gems of the poem. Mental agony
does not incapacitate for devotion; love does not preclude deceit; nor
deceit extreme delicacy and beauty of feeling at given moments. And
the letter--what becomes of it? Juan reads it, sighing and weeping, on
board ship; in the middle of its affecting comparison of the manner in
which men love with that in which women love, he is interrupted--by
sea-sickness. Poor letter, poor Julia, poor Juan, poor humanity!--for
is not this human life? Once again, poor letter! After the shipwreck,
when the crew of the boat have devoured their last ration and have
long gazed hungrily at each other's famished figures, they agree to
determine by lot which one of them shall be killed and eaten by the
others. Search is made for paper, but not a scrap is to be found in the
boat except Julia's poetical and loving letter; it is snatched from
Juan and cut into squares, which are numbered. One of these numbered
squares brings death to Pedrillo. Is there, then, really a sphere in
the firmament of heaven where idealistic love and cannibal instincts
are to be found side by side, nay, meet upon one square inch of paper?
Byron answers that he knows one--the Earth.
From the shipwreck scene we are transported straight to Haidée.
Compared with her, all the Greek maidens of Byron's earlier poems are
immature attempts. Nowhere in the whole range of modern poetry had the
love of a child of nature been so beautifully described. Goethe's best
girl figures, Gretchen and Clärchen, charming as they are, are little
_bourgeoises_; we feel that their creator was a Frankfort citizen,
to whom nature revealed herself in his position as a member of the
middle class, and culture displayed itself at a small German court. In
Byron's most beautiful female characters there is nothing bourgeois--no
middle-class manners and customs have modified their free naturalness.
We feel, when we read of Juan and Haidée, that Byron is a descendant
of Rousseau; but we also feel that his high and independent social
position, in combination with the character of the fortunes that had
befallen him, had given him a much more emancipated view of human
nature than Rousseau ever attained to.
"And thus they wander'd forth, and hand in hand,
Over the shining pebbles and the shells,
Glided along the smooth and harden'd sand,
And in the worn and wild receptacles
Work'd by the storms, yet work'd as it were plann'd,
In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells,
They turn'd to rest; and, each clasp'd by an arm,
Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm.
They look'd up to the sky, whose floating glow
Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright;
They gazed upon the glittering sea below,
Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight;
They heard the waves' splash, and the wind so low,
And saw each other's dark eyes darting light
Into each other--and, beholding this,
Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss;
A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth, and love,
And beauty, all concentrating like rays
Into one focus, kindled from above;
Such kisses as belong to early days,
Where heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move,
And the blood's lava, and the pulse a blaze,
Each kiss a heart-quake....
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Haidée spoke not of scruples, ask'd no vows,
Nor offer'd any; she had never heard
Of plight and promises to be a spouse,
Or perils by a loving maid incurr'd"
What reader (especially if he comes straight from the erotic hypocrisy
of the literature of the French reactionary period) but feels carried
away by this strong current of warm youthful passion, by the poet's
ardent enthusiasm for natural beauty, and by his profound scorn for the
prudishness of conventional morality! Is there, then, a world, a world
of law in which 2 and 2 make 4, an animal world in which all the lowest
and most disgusting instincts may come to the surface at any moment,
and yet in which such revelations of beauty in human life--revelations
lasting for a moment, or a day, or a month, or a year, or an eternity
of years--occur? Yes, answers Byron, there is such a world, and it is
the world in which we all live. And now, away from these scenes to the
slave market, to the seraglio, to the battlefield, to systematic murder
and rape and the bayoneting of little children!
The poem is made up of such contrasts and contradictions. But it is not
a sensuous, playfully satiric epic of the nature of Ariosto's; it is a
passionate work, instinct with political purpose, full of wrath, scorn,
threats, and appeals, with from time to time a loud, long blast on the
revolutionary war trumpet.[1] Byron does not merely describe horrors;
he interprets them. After quoting "the butcher" Suwarrow's rhymed
despatch to Catherine announcing the capture of Ismail, he adds:
"He wrote this Polar melody, and set it.
Duly accompanied by shrieks and groans,
Which few will sing, I trust, but none forget it--
For I will teach, if possible, the stones
To rise against earth's tyrants. Never let it
Be said that we still truckle unto thrones;--
But ye, our children's children I think how we
Show'd _what things_ were before the world was free!"
If, considering both from this point of view, we compare _Don Juan_
with _Faust_, the great poem of the beginning of the century, we feel
that the strong, practical, historical spirit of _Don Juan_ carries,
as it were, more weight with it than the philosophical spirit which
inspires _Faust_. And if we place it for a moment in imagination beside
its Russian offspring, Pushkin's _Jevgeni Onjœgin_, and its Danish
offspring, Paludan-Müller's _Adam Homo_, the fresh sea breeze of nature
and fact in the English poem seems to us all the stronger in contrast
with the polish and the political feebleness of the Russian, and the
narrow morality of the clever Danish, poem. In _Don Juan_ we have
nature and fact; in _Faust_, nature and profound reflection. _Don Juan_
gives us in full, broad detail the human life which _Faust_ condenses
into a personification; and the whole work is the production of an
indignation which has written where it can be read by the mighty of all
ages its "_Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin_."
Not until he wrote this work was Byron completely himself. The thorough
experience he had now had of life had cured him of all youthful
credulity. He knew now exactly what went to the composition of the
average man, and what regulated that man's life. He has been called
misanthrope because of his savage satire of such lives. He himself
gives the proper answer to the impeachment (ix. 21):--
"Why do they call me misanthrope? _Because_
_They hate me, not I them?_
There is no doubt that he is occasionally cynical, but it is where
nature herself is shameless.
Is he very far wrong when he says (v. 48, 49):
"Some talk of an appeal unto some passion,
Some to men's feeling, others to their reason;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
no
Method's more sure at moments to take hold
Of the best feelings of mankind, which grow
More tender, as we every day behold,
Than that all-softening, overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul--the dinner-bell."
Is he wrong when (ix. 73) he affirms love to be vain and selfish? Or
does he let his satirical temper carry him too far when he says, in
describing the happiness of family life (iii. 60):
"Yet a fine family is a fine thing
(Provided they don't come in after dinner);
'Tis beautiful to see a matron bring
Her children up (if nursing them don't thin her)."
Alas! as long as there is a wrong side to the most beautiful things,
it is in vain to forbid the poet to show it to us, let the moralist
groan as he will. These passages are among the most cynical in the
poem. And it is to be remarked that the bitter, Rousseau-like attacks
on civilisation (as the joys of which the poet enumerates "war,
pestilence, the despot's desolation, the kingly scourge") are always
accompanied by ardent declarations of love for nature (see especially
viii. 61-68).
Byron exclaims (iii. 104):
"Some kinder casuists are pleased to say,
In nameless print--that I have no devotion;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My altars are the mountain and the ocean,
Earth, air, stars, all that springs from the great Whole,
Who hath produced, and will receive the soul."
But, unfortunately, natural religion of this kind was not in accordance
with theological ritual. Like a refrain from _Childe Harold_ recurs the
glorification of liberty of thought (xi. 90):--
"I may stand alone,
But would not change my free thoughts for a throne."
There are savage attacks on the theory of the origin of sin advanced by
theology, and satire of orthodoxy and its doctrine that sickness and
misfortune make us good. Of sin we read (ix. 19):--
"'But heaven,' as Cassio says, "is above all--
No more of this, then, let us pray!' We have
Souls to save, since Eve's slip and Adam's fall,
Which tumbled all mankind into the grave,
Besides fish, beasts, and birds. 'The sparrow's fall
Is special providence,' though how it gave
Offence, we know not; probably it perch'd
Upon the tree which Eve so fondly search'd."
We observe how much freer and bolder the tone has become since the days
when _Cain_ was written. On the subject of sick-bed orthodoxy Byron
writes:--
"I don't know what the reason is--the air
Perhaps; but as I suffer from the shocks
Of illness, I grow much more orthodox.
The first attack at once proved the Divinity
(But _that_ I never doubted, nor the Devil);
The next, the Virgin's mystical virginity;
The third, the usual origin of evil;
The fourth at once established the whole Trinity
On so uncontrovertible a level,
That I devoutly wish'd the three were four
On purpose to believe so much the more."
Byron had now reached the stage in his literary career when he had
difficulty in getting his works published. Murray was apprehensive, and
drew back. Not even a bookseller was to be found who would sell the
earlier cantos of _Don Juan_ at the author's risk. Byron says, when
comparing his own fate with Napoleon's (_Don Juan_, xi. 56):--
"But Juan was my Moscow, and Faliero
My Leipsic, and my Mont Saint Jean seems Cain:
'La Belle Alliance' of dunces down at zero,
Now that the Lion's fall'n, may rise again."
We have already noted what Southey dared to say in the preface to his
servile poem, _The Vision of Judgment_. Adopting the rôle of informer,
he called upon the Government to prevent the sale of Byron's works--for
that his attack was upon Byron he plainly avowed in his rejoinder to
Byron's answer, triumphantly boasting: "Of the work which I _have_
done, it becomes me not here to speak, save only as relates to the
Satanic School, and its Coryphæus, the author of _Don Juan_. I have
held up that school to public detestation, as enemies to the religion,
the institutions, and the domestic morals of the country. I have given
them a designation _to which their founder and leader answers_. I have
sent a stone from my sling which has smitten their Goliath in the
forehead. I have fastened his name upon the gibbet, for reproach and
ignominy, as long as it shall endure.--Take it down who can!"
Thus wrote the retained and salaried scribbler, who, as Byron says,
had lied himself into the post of Poet-laureate. Byron replied in his
admirable satire, HIS _Vision of Judgment_. In it, as in Southey's
vision, George the Third arrives at the gates of heaven and requests to
be admitted. But Saint Peter is not at all willing to open for him. The
locks and keys are rusty; there has been so little doing; since 1789
every one has been going to hell. Cherubs arrive to insist on the old
man's being admitted--for all the angels are Tories. But Satan makes
his appearance as accuser, and he and Saint Michael dispute possession
of the dead man. Both produce witnesses, and amongst others Southey is
called. Southey begins to read his own works aloud, and goes on so long
that all, angels and devils, take flight, and in the general confusion
the old King slips into heaven. Saint Peter upraises his keys and
knocks the poet down with them:--
"Who fell, like Phaëthon, but more at ease,
Into his lake, for there he did not drown;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He first sank to the bottom--like his works,
But soon rose to the surface--like himself;
For all corrupted things are buoy'd like corks."
The little masterpiece is imposed on exactly the same lines as the
poem of Southey's which it parodies.[2] The difficulty was to get
it printed. Murray would not accept it, nor would any other London
publisher.
It was while he was in this dilemma that Byron was guilty of the
literary imprudence which injured him more than any other in the
estimation of the English reading public. A talented, but not much
respected man, the Radical author, Leigh Hunt, whom Byron as a young
man, to show his politics, had (in company with Moore) visited when
he was in prison for libelling the Prince Regent, and who was now
on terms of intimacy with Shelley, conceived the idea of starting a
Radical periodical in collaboration with Shelley and Byron. Shelley,
out of modesty, held back himself, but no sooner had he intimated to
Hunt that there was a possibility of his obtaining Byron's assistance,
than Hunt gave up all his occupations and chances of earning a living
in England, and landed, penniless and helpless, with wife and family,
in Italy, where Byron generously gave them shelter under his roof. But
it soon became evident that no real community was possible between
two men of such different natures and different calibre; Byron could
not stand Hunt's indiscreet familiarity; Hunt was offended by Byron's
haughtiness. But the worst misfortune was, that Byron sank incredibly
in the estimation of his countrymen by this alliance with such an
inferior man.
In vain did Thomas Moore, when refusing to contribute to the proposed
journal, write: "I deprecate such a plan with all my might.... You are,
single-handed, a match for the world--which is saying a good deal, the
world being, like Briareus, a very many-handed gentleman,--but, to be
so, _you must stand alone_. Recollect that the scurvy buildings about
St. Peter's almost seem to overtop itself." Byron had promised to
help Hunt, and would not be induced to take back his word. He little
thought that, after his death, Leigh Hunt's first action would be to
write three volumes with the purpose of sullying his fame.[3] He gave
him _The Vision of Judgment_ and _Heaven and Earth_, the grand poem
on the destruction of the world by the Flood, to which we Danes trace
a likeness in Paludan-Müller's _Ahasuerus_. But the periodical, which
it was originally proposed to call _The Carbonari_, but which, from
political reasons, came out under the feeble name of _The Liberal_, was
received with such complete disapprobation that it was given up after
only four numbers had appeared. The arena of literature was thus almost
closed for Byron, and the only field that really remained open to him
was that of action, of war, in the literal sense of the word, for his
ideas.
But before embarking on this new venture he gave his revolutionary
feelings vent in _Don Juan_ and _The Age of Bronze_. Shelley considered
that Byron was qualified by his ambition and his powers to be "the
redeemer of his degraded country." But he was mistaken; Byron was
little suited to take part in the obstinate, slow struggle of the
English Opposition for liberty. Besides, it was not the political
predicament of England alone that aroused his sympathies and occupied
his thoughts; in his revolt against all oppression and hatred of all
hypocrisy he made himself the spokesman of the whole suffering world.
His blood boiled when he thought of the slaves in America, of the
ill-treatment of the Irish lower classes, of the martyrdom of the
Italian patriots.
Of the French Revolution Byron had always approved. He admired Napoleon
in the first stages of his career; but when the hero of the age passed
"The Rubicon of man's awaken'd rights,
To herd with vulgar kings and parasites,"
and finally, at Fontainebleau, preferred abdication to suicide, he
overwhelmed his quondam ideal leader with the fiercest satire. There is
much resemblance between Byron's attitude towards Napoleon and Heine's.
Both pour ridicule on the so-called wars of liberation waged against
him by their respective countries. The great difference is, that the
Englishman's inflexible pride and his devotion to liberty made it
impossible for him to lose himself in the almost feminine admiration
and enthusiasm by which the German was possessed. Napoleon's military
fame made no impression on the man who has beautifully said (_Don
Juan_, viii. 3) that
"The drying up a single tear has more
Of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore";
and who admired no warriors but those who, like Leonidas and
Washington, fought for freedom.
Byron had long flourished his lash above the Prince Regent's head,
and many a telling stroke had fallen upon that royal personage's fat
body:--"Though Ireland starve, great George weighs twenty stone."
"Charles to his people, Henry to his wife," &c. Now he took the country
itself to task. His lash falls upon everything false and objectionable,
from the legend of the Virgin Queen, "our own half-chaste Elizabeth,"
as he calls her in _Don Juan_ (ix. 81), down to the latest requirements
of public opinion (_Don Juan_, vii. 22):
"Then there were Frenchmen, gallant, young, and gay;
But I'm too great a patriot to record
Their Gallic names upon a glorious day;
I'd rather tell ten lies than say a word
Of truth;--such truths are treason."
He is daring enough to attribute great part of the honour of Waterloo
to the Prussians; to call (in imitation of Béranger) Wellington
"Villainton," and to tell him that he has obtained great pensions and
much praise for doing nothing but "repairing Legitimacy's crutch." And
with a feeling and fervour far surpassing that displayed by Moore in
his satirical letters, he tells England of the hatred of herself which
she has aroused in other nations by her Tory politics. "I've no great
cause," he writes (_Don Juan_, x. 66):
"I've no great cause to love that spot of earth,
Which holds what _might have been_ the noblest nation;
But though I owe it little but my birth,
I feel a mix'd regret and veneration
For its decaying fame and former worth.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alas! could she but fully, truly know
How her great name is now throughout abhorred;
How eager all the earth is for the blow
Which shall lay bare her bosom to the sword;
How all the nations deem her their worst foe,
That worse than _worst of foes_, the once adored
False friend, who held out freedom to mankind,
And now would chain them, to the very mind;--
Would she be proud, or boast herself the free,
Who is but first of slaves? The nations are
In prison,--but the gaoler, what is he?
No less a victim to the bolt and bar.
Is the poor privilege to turn the key
Upon the captive, freedom? He's as far
From the enjoyment of the earth and air
Who watches o'er the chain, as they who wear."
Byron had now reached the altitude at which all ordinary conventions
lost their hold upon him. He pursued the "Ministry of Mediocrities,"
as he called it, with his satire even after the death of its members.
He would not let Castlereagh rest quietly in his grave, because, as he
says in one of the prefaces to _Don Juan_, the system of oppression and
hypocrisy with which that statesman's name is synonymous, endured long
after his death. The watchword of the day, sovereignty "by the grace
of God," was obnoxious to him, as was also the perpetual recurrence
of the phrases: Britannia's rule of the waves, the glorious British
constitution, the noble Emperors, and the pious Russian people. On the
coins of gold appear once more, he writes after the fall of Napoleon,
faces with the old "sterling, stupid stamp." The universal idolisation
of the most uncivilised nation of Europe disgusted him. One could not
go anywhere at that time without hearing the sentimental Cossack's
song of farewell to his sweetheart, the first words of which, "Schöne
Minka," are not yet forgotten.
Thus it was Byron who, towards the middle of the twenties, inaugurated
the Radical campaign against political Romanticism and that Holy
Alliance which was nothing but a systématisation of the political
hypocrisy of Europe. Byron called it:
"An earthly trinity! which wears the shape
Of heaven's, as man is mimicked by the ape.
A pious unity! in purpose one--
To melt three fools to a Napoleon."
He jeered at "the coxcomb Czar, the autocrat of waltzes and of war."
He ridiculed the "twenty fools" at Laybach, who imagined that their
hypocritical proceedings could determine the destiny of the human race.
He cried:
"O Wilberforce! thou man of black renown,
Whose merit none enough can sing or say,
Thou hast struck one immense Colossus down,
Thou moral Washington of Africa!
But there's another little thing, I own,
Which you should perpetrate some summer's day,
And set the other half of earth to rights;
You have freed the _blacks_--now pray shut up the whites.
Shut up the bald-coot bully Alexander!
Ship off the Holy Three to Senegal;
Teach them that 'sauce for goose is sauce for gander,'
And ask them how _they_ like to be in thrall?"
What language! What tones breaking the death-like silence of oppressed
Europe! The political air rang with the shrill notes; for no word
uttered by Lord Byron fell unheard to the ground. The legions of
the fugitives, the banished, the oppressed, the conspirators, of
every nation, kept their eyes fixed upon the one man who, amidst the
universal debasement of intelligences and characters to a low standard,
stood upright, beautiful as an Apollo, brave as an Achilles, prouder
than all the kings of Europe together. Free, in his quality of English
peer, from molestation everywhere, he made himself the mouthpiece of
the dumb revolutionary indignation which was seething in the breasts of
the best friends and lovers of liberty in Europe.
He himself had defined poetry as passion;[4] and inspired passion was
what his own became. Listen to some of the thunders that pealed over
Europe:
"You hardly will believe such things were true
As now occur, I thought that I would pen you 'em;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And when you hear historians talk of thrones
And those that sate upon them, let it be
As we now gaze upon the mammoth's bones,
And wonder what old world such things could see."
(_Don Juan_, viii. 136, 137).
"Think if then George the Fourth should be dug up!
How the new worldlings of the then new East
Will wonder where such animals could sup!"
(_Don Juan_, ix. 39).
"But never mind;--'God save the king!' and kings!
For if _he_ don't, I doubt if _men_ will longer--
I think I hear a little bird, who sings
The people by and by will be the stronger:
The veriest jade will wince whose harness wrings
So much into the raw as quite to wrong her
Beyond the rules of posting,--and the mob
At last fall sick of imitating Job.
At first it grumbles, then it swears, and then,
Like David, flings smooth pebbles 'gainst a giant;
At last it takes to weapons such as men
Snatch when despair makes human hearts less pliant.
Then comes 'the tug of war;'--'twill come again,
I rather doubt; and I would fain say 'fie on't,'
If I had not perceived that revolution
Alone can save the earth from hell's pollution."
(_Don Juan_, viii. 50, 51).
"And I will war, at least in words (and--should
My chance so happen--deeds), with all who war
With Thought;--and of Thought's foes by far most rude,
Tyrants and sycophants have been and are.
I know not who may conquer: if I could
Have such a prescience, it should be no bar
To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation
Of every despotism in every nation."
(_Don Juan_, ix. 24).
[1]
"I have prated
Just now enough; but by and by I'll prattle
Like Roland's horn in Roncesvalles' battle."
[2] For other attacks on Southey, see _Don Juan_, i 205; iii. 80, 93;
ix. 35; x. 13.
[3] Thomas Moore aptly compares Hunt to the dog which was allowed by
the lion to live in his cage, but which, after the lion's death, had
nothing but evil to say of him:--
"Though he roar'd pretty well--this the puppy allows--
It was all, he says, borrow'd--all second-hand roar;
And he vastly prefers his own little bow-wows
To the loftiest war-note the lion could pour.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nay, fed as he was (and this makes it a dark case)
With sops every day from the lion's own pan,
He lifts up his leg at the noble beast's carcase,
And--does all a dog, so diminutive, can."
[4] Poetry, which is but passion." _Don Juan_, iv. 106.