Byron's Don Juan

A Critical Study

Elizabeth French Boyd

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317230373
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Literaturkritik

When this book was published in 1945, interest in Byron's poetry and appreciation of his titanic role in Romanticism had been steadily increasing. 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 as representative of the era, and of modern European civilization. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

CHAPTER ONE

“Against the Wind”

1

On July 15, 1819, the first two cantos of Byron’s masterpiece appeared on the shelves of the London booksellers. They had been heralded by rumors circulated among the literary world for several months, hinting that the expected poem not only was novel and powerful, but was causing grave misgivings in the breasts of Byron’s publisher and literary advisers. This first sample of Don Juan, published under such unfavorable auspices, found a very mixed reception. At first the sale was languid. Influential reviews poured torrents of abuse upon it. Journals of radical tendency pronounced in its favor. Readers who had hitherto been strong partisans of Byron recorded their disapproval and apprehension in letters to their friends. Don Juan administered a shock to the public, which felt that it now saw Byron for the first time in his true colors and resented the fact that the loftiness and grandeur of all his earlier poetry had cheated it into such open, passionate admiration of a truly reprehensible poet.

The public was right, not only in immediately ascribing the anonymous Don Juan to Byron, but in sensing its particular tone of authority. Byron, in his poetic career, had gradually liberated himself from every ulterior motive and hindering influence and was producing Don Juan out of the integrity of his free artistic conscience. The poem is an expression of the essential Byron, not only an exile from his homeland, but an alien to the insular English public of his times.

Thus began the disillusionment of the English public, which had been taught by its own taste and by critical enthusiasm to rhapsodize over Byron’s poetry, and thus began the controversies of the critics, which helped to diminish Byron’s poetic fame for nearly a century. “The Grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme” himself declared that Don Juan was his Moscow. To this day it remains a poem less frequently read or understood than it deserves, though everyone willingly acknowledges its pre-eminence.

The history of the conception of Don Juan in Byron’s mind and of its relation to his whole poetic career is of great importance in attempting 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.

2

The first critical guidance was no light touch, but a humiliating lashing that would have silenced forever any “minor” poet less pugnacious 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 policy re-enforced with continental authority literary fashions already in vogue in England. The topics of discussion at Murray’s gatherings — political economy, philosophy, theories of art and of versification, Renaissance literature, the revolution, secret histories and memoirs, English politics, and the manners of nations European and in distant lands — formed a rich and variegated nutriment for the education of any young poet. It was a school that represented the cream of both the classic and the romantic traditions.

Murray was conscious of his responsibility toward Byron’s best poetic capabilities. It is amusing to see in his letters how he tries to jockey himself into position, and how quickly he learns both to dread Byron’s independence and to guide it with the best tact he can muster. He begins with a fatherly attempt to discipline his new poet and, using Gifford’s words as additional support, to inspire in Byron ambition to produce some really great work. As time goes on, the letters become more obsequious and enthusiastic: Murray has caught a tiger by the tail, is astonished at his luck and appalled at the daily possibilities of disaster owing to Byron’s political caprice and inexperience. He relays to Byron the conservative critics’ responses to each of the new poems, Gifford’s, Frere’s, Canning’s, Dudley Ward’s, and reports with growing excitement the stupendous sales achieved.

At first Byron obeyed the voice of criticism when it did not attempt to shout down his own strongest convictions. In Childe Harold, Canto I, for instance, he had included several satiric stanzas, as Moore says:

‘full of direct personality, and some that degenerated into a style still more familiar and ludicrous than that of the description of a London Sunday, which still disfigures the poem. In thus mixing up the light with the solemn, it was the intention of the poet to imitate Ariosto. But it is far easier to rise, with grace …. than to interrupt thus a prolonged tone of solemnity by any descent into the ludicrous or burlesque.” ²

Gifford, Murray, and others objected to these stanzas as much on political grounds as on their violation of sentiment and literary taste, and Byron suppressed this early effusion of Don Juanism. But it remained in his mind, overflowing in satires like The Waltz, The Devil’s Drive, and unacknowledged epigrams and bits of verse in the public press. Moreover, it was habitually expressed in his letters, journals, and conversation. Many of his speculations in the 1813–14 Journal were drawn out again in almost the same words in Don Juan, for example, those on Congreve and Vanbrugh,³ on Jeffrey,⁴ on a future life,⁵ and on the visit to the Jerseys at Middleton in 1812, when he met “Longbow” an...