shows how far he was from the loftier mode of imagination. In place of
heroic passion he must seek another outlet of relief, another mode of
purging away melancholy; and the spirit of the burlesque came lightly to
his use as the only available _vis medica_. The feeling was common to
his age, but he alone was able to adapt the motive to epic needs. How
often the melancholy sentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a
burlesque conclusion! Or, if we regard the novel, how often does
Thackeray in like manner replace the old heroic relief of passion by a
kindly smile at the brief and busy cares of men. But neither Heine nor
Thackeray carries the principle of the burlesque to its artistic
completion, or makes it the avowed motive of a complicated action, as
Byron does in _Don Juan_. That poem is indeed "prolific of melancholy
merriment." It is not necessary to point out at length the persistence
of this mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home-attachments, are all
burlesqued; battle ardour, the special theme of epic sublimity, is
subjected to the same quizzical mockery:
There was not now a luggage boy, but sought
Danger and spoil with ardour much increased;
And why? because a little--odd--old man,
Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van.
In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of suffering which leads to
cannibalism is interrupted thus:
At length they caught two Boobies, and a Noddy,
And then they left off eating the dead body.
The description of London town as seen from Shooter's Hill ends with
this absurd metaphor:
A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head--and there is London Town!
Even Death laughs,--death that "_hiatus maxime defiendus_," "the dunnest
of all duns," etc. And, last of all, the poet turns the same weapon
against his own art. Do the lines for a little while grow serious, he
suddenly pulls himself up with a sneer:
Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic,
Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea!
I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that _Don Juan_ is
something quite different from the mere mock-heroic--from Pulci, for
instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to
imitate. The poem is in a sense not half but wholly serious, for the
very reason that it takes so broad a view of human activity, and because
of its persistent moral sense. (Which is nowise contradicted by the
immoral scenes in several of the cantos.) It is not, for example,
possible to think of finding in Pulci such a couplet as this:
But almost sanctify the sweet excess
By the immortal wish and power to bless.
He who could write such lines as those was not merely indulging his
humour. _Don Juan_ is something more than
A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.
Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his passions
which, though heroic in intensity, had ended in quailing of the heart,
he sought what the great makers of epic had sought,--a solace and a
sense of uplifted freedom. The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of
religion was gone; but, passing to the opposite extreme, by showing the
power of the human heart to mock at all things, he would still set forth
the possibility of standing above and apart from all things. He, too,
went beyond the limitations of destiny by laughter, as Homer and Virgil
and Milton had risen by the imagination. And, in doing this, he wrote
the modern epic.
We are learning a new significance of human life, as I said; and the
sublime audacities of the elder poets in attempting to transcend the
melancholia of their day are growing antiquated, just as Byron's heroic
mockery is turning stale. In a few years we shall have come so much
closer to the mysteries over which the poets bungled helplessly, that we
can afford to forget their rhapsodies. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to
make clear to ourselves the purpose and character of one of the few, the
very few, great poems in our literature.