It has often been a source of wonder to me that I was able to read and
enjoy Byron's _Don Juan_ under the peculiar circumstances attending my
introduction to that poem. I had been walking in the Alps, and after a
day of unusual exertion found myself in the village of Chamouni,
fatigued and craving rest. A copy of the Tauchnitz edition fell into my
hands, and there, in a little room, through a summer's day, by a window
which looked full upon the unshadowed splendour of Mont Blanc, I sat and
read, and only arose when Juan faded out of sight with "the phantom of
her frolic Grace--Fitz-Fulke." I have often wondered, I say, why the
incongruity of that solemn Alpine scene with the mockery of Byron's wit
did not cause me to shut the book and thrust it away, for in general I
am highly sensitive to the nature of my surroundings while reading. Only
recently, on taking up the poem again for the purpose of editing it, did
the answer to that riddle occur to me, and with it a better
understanding of the place of _Don Juan_ among the great epics which
might have seemed in finer accord with the sublimity and peace of that
memorable day.
In one respect, at least, it needed no return to Byron's work to show
how closely it is related in spirit to the accepted canons of the past.
These poets, who have filled the world with their rumour, all looked
upon life with some curious obliquity of vision. We, who have approached
the consummation of the world's hope, know that happiness and peace and
the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down and brood for ever
more over the lot of mankind, but with them it seems to have been
otherwise. Who can forget the recurring _minynthadion_ of Homer, in
which he summed up for the men of his day the vanity of long
aspirations? So if we were asked to point out the lines of Shakespeare
that express most completely his attitude toward life, we should
probably quote that soliloquy of Hamlet wherein he catalogues the evils
of existence, and only in the fear of future dreams finds a reason for
continuance; or we should cite that sonnet of disillusion: "Tired with
all these for restful death I cry." And as for the lyric poets, sooner
or later the lament of Shelley was wrung from the lips of each:
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more--oh, never more!
This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears that these poets,
prophets who spoke in the language of beauty and who have held the
world's reverence so long--it appears now that these interpreters of the
fates were all misled. Possibly, as Aristotle intimated, genius is
allied to some vice of the secretions which produces a melancholia of
the brain; something like this, indeed, only expressed in more recondite
terms, may be found in the most modern theory of science. But more
probably they wrote merely from insufficient experience, not having
perceived how the human race with increase of knowledge grows in
happiness. Thus, at least, it seems to one who observes the tides of
thought. Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which
will prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish
ignorance of man's sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new element
more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding over human
feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some acceptance of the
larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all tears and bring down
upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality and a possession for
ever; some new philosophy of the soul will convert the old poems of
conflict into meaningless fables, stale and unprofitable. Already we see
the change at hand. To how many persons to-day does Browning
appeal--though they would not always confess it--more powerfully than
Homer or Milton or any other of the great names of antiquity? And the
reason of this closer appeal of Browning is chiefly the unflagging
optimism of his philosophy, his full-blooded knowledge and sympathy
which make the wailings of the past somewhat silly in our ears, if truth
must be told. I never read Browning but those extraordinary lines of
Euripides recur to my mind: "Not now for the first time do I regard
mortal things as a shadow, nor would I fear to charge with supreme folly
those artificers of words who are reckoned the sages of mankind, for no
man among mortals is happy." [Greek: Thneton gar oudeis estin eudaimon],
indeed!--would any one be shameless enough to utter such words under the
new dispensation of official optimism?
It is necessary to think of these things before we attempt to criticise
Byron, for _Don Juan_, too, despite its marvellous vivacity, looks upon
life from the old point of view. Already, for this reason in part, it
seems a little antiquated to us, and in a few years it may be read only
as a curiosity. Meanwhile for the few who lag behind in the urgent march
of progress the poem will possess a special interest just because it
presents the ancient thesis of the poets and prophets in a novel form.
Of course, in many lesser matters it makes a wider and more lasting
appeal. Part of the Haidee episode, for instance, is so exquisitely
lovely, so radiant with the golden haze of youth, that even in the wiser
happiness of our maturity we may still turn to it with a kind of
complacent delight. Briefer passages scattered here and there, such as
the "'T is sweet to hear," and the "Ave Maria," need only a little
abridgment at the close to fit them perfectly for any future anthology
devoted to the satisfaction and the ultimate significance of human
emotions. But, strangely enough, these disturbing climaxes, which will
demand to be forgotten, or to be rearranged as we restore old mutilated
statues, do, indeed, point to those very qualities which render the poem
so extraordinary a complement to the great and accepted epics of the
past. For the present it may yet be sufficient to consider _Don Juan_ as
it is--with all its enormities upon it.
And, first of all, we shall make a sad mistake if we regard the poem as
a mere work of satire. Occasionally Byron pretends to lash himself into
a righteous fury over the vices of the age, but we know that this is all
put on, and that the real savageness of his nature comes out only when
he thinks of his own personal wrongs. Now this is a very different thing
from the deliberate and sustained denunciation of a vicious age such as
we find in Juvenal, a different thing utterly from the _saeva indignatio_
that devoured the heart and brain of poor Swift. There is in _Don Juan_
something of the personal satire of Pope, and something of the whimsical
mockery of Lucilius and his imitators. But it needs but a little
discernment to see that Byron's poem has vastly greater scope and
significance than the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, or the spasmodic
gaiety of the Menippean satire. It does in its own way present a view
of life as a whole, with the good and the evil, and so passes beyond the
category of the merely satirical. The very scope of its subject, if
nothing more, classes it with the more universal epics of literature
rather than with the poems that portray only a single aspect of life.
Byron himself was conscious of this, and more than once alludes to the
larger aspect of his work. "If you must have an epic," he once said to
Medwin, "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." And in one of the
asides in the poem itself he avows the same design:
A panoramic view of Hell's in training,
After the style of Virgil and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.
Hardly the style of those stately writers, to be sure, but an epic after
its own fashion the poem certainly is. That Byron's way is not the way
of the older poets requires no emphasis; they
reveled in the fancies of the time,
True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic;
But all these, save the last, being obsolete,
I chose a modern subject as more meet.
Being cut off from the heroic subjects of the established school, he
still sought to obtain something of the same large and liberating effect
through the use of a frankly modern theme. The task was not less
difficult than his success was singular and marked; and that is why it
seemed in no way inappropriate, despite its occasional lapse of
licentiousness, to read _Don Juan_ with the white reflection of Mont
Blanc streaming through the window. Homer might have been so read, or
Virgil, or any of those poets who presented life solemnly and
magniloquently; I do not think I could have held my mind to Juvenal or
Pope or even Horace beneath the calm radiance of that Alpine light.
I have said that the great poets all took a sombre view of the world.
Man is but _the dream of a shadow_, said Pindar, speaking for the race
of genius, and Byron is conscious of the same insight into the illusive
spectacle. He has looked with like vision upon
this scene of all-confessed inanity,
By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet,
and will not in his turn refrain "from holding up the nothingness of
life." So in the introduction to the seventh canto he runs through the
list of those who have preached and sung this solemn, but happily to us
outworn, theme:
I say no more than hath been said in Dante's
Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes.
It must not be supposed, however, because the heroic poems of old were
touched with the pettiness and sadness of human destiny, that their
influence on the reader was supposed to be narrowing or depressing; the
name "heroic" implies the contrary of that. Indeed their very
inspiration was derived from the fortitude of a spirit struggling to
rise above the league of little things and foiling despairs. It may seem
paradoxical to us, yet it is true that these morbid poets believed in
the association of men with gods and in the grandeur of mortal passions.
So Achilles and Hector, both with the knowledge of their brief destiny
upon them, both filled with foreboding of frustrate hopes, strive nobly
to the end of magnanimous defeat. There lay the greatness of the heroic
epos for readers of old,--the sense of human littleness, the melancholy
of broken aspirations, swallowed up in the transcending sublimity of
man's endurance and daring. And men of lesser mould, who knew so well
the limitations of their sphere, took courage and were taught to look
down unmoved upon their harassed fate.
Now Byron came at a time of transition from the old to the new. The
triumphs of material discovery, "_Le magnifiche sorti e progressive_,"
had not yet cast a reproach on the earlier sense of life's futility,
while at the same time the faith in heroic passions had passed away. An
attempt to create an epic in the old spirit would have been doomed, was
indeed doomed in the hands of those who undertook it. The very language
in which Byron presents the ancient universal belief of Plato and those
others