Byron invokes another Shakespearean rag, this time Falstaff’s return volley of tavern-cursing at Prince Hal (Henry IV Part I, II ii) for fresh inspiration (literally, ‘breath’) – here, writing a kind of prose-poem supplement.
Byron’s exuberant declaration of principles and practices was one effect of the controversy; another effect, related to this, was an unwitting recognition by others of a newness that could not be ignored, that compelled attention. One of the first symptoms was the alarm sounded by Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Despite the fact that Murray had a financial interest in this periodical and that William Blackwood was his Edinburgh agent, and despite the fact that the magazine was meant to be less stodgy in its convervatism than Murray’s Quarterly, the advent of Don Juan trumped all predictions. In its July 1819 issue, Blackwood’s alerted its readers about Byron’s new venture: ‘It is indeed truly pitiable to think that one of the greatest Poets of the age should have written a Poem that no respectable Bookseller could have published without disgracing himself – but a Work so atrocious must not be suffered to pass into oblivion without the infliction of that punishment on its guilty author due to such a wanton outrage on all most dear to human nature.’ Preventing the impunity of oblivion, Blackwood’s worked up a formal (unsigned) review of Don Juan for the August issue to broadcast the danger: ‘there is unquestionably a more thorough and intense infusion of genius and vice – power and profligacy – than in any poem which had ever before been written in the English, or indeed any other modern language’. Where Napoleon had been defeated, Byron promised to conquer the world, a resurrected Napoleon of the realms of rhyme. It was the infusion of genius and power that most exercised Blackwood’s, because this was the vehicle of vice:
The moral strain of the whole poem is pitched in the lowest key – and if the genius of the author lifts him now and then out of his pollution, it seems as if he regretted the elevation, and made all haste to descend again. To particularize the offences committed in its pages would be worse than vain – because the great genius of the man seems to have been throughout exerted to its utmost strength, in devising every possible method of pouring scorn upon every element of good or noble nature in the hearts of his readers. Love – honour – patriotism – religion, are mentioned only to be scoffed at and derided… 12
Yet even the very cry of alarm had to acknowledge ‘genius’ and ‘power’, ‘great genius’ and ‘utmost strength’ – the countercultural shock coming from an aristocrat with a Norman title, no less.
Lord Byron knew he was right, and in October, he wrote a joking letter to Douglas Kinnaird (a liberal friend from schooldays) about the canting:
As to ‘Don Juan’ – confess – confess – you dog – and be candid – that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing – it may be bawdy – but is it not good English? – it may be profligate – but is it not life, is it not the thing? – Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? – on a table? – and under it? – I have written about a hundred stanzas of a third Canto – but it is damned modest – the outcry has frightened me. – I had such projects for the Don – but the Cant is so much stronger than Cunt – now a days, – that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables – must be lost to despairing posterity. (BLJ VI 232)
Posterity was more open than Byron imagined at this crisis, however. It turned out that Blackwood’s, too, was born for contradiction, more welcoming to Cantos III–V than many other reviews. It hardly mattered. By the time Blackmood’s was tendering a revised opinion, the poem was reviewer-proof. Booksellers, their eye on the market rather than the moral, stormed Murray’s establishment to stock their shelves, and parcels had to be handed out of the windows ‘in answer to their obstreperous demands’. 13
Today, few would quarrel with editor Jerome McGann that ‘Don Juan is the most important poem published in England between 1667 (when Paradise Lost was issued), and 1850, when The Prelude finally appeared in print.’ 14 McGann implies the generic affiliations: Don Juan flaunts its Miltonic patterns, riffs, parodies, rivalries, and Wordsworth’s Prelude was the first explicit poetic autobiography in English literature, regarded by its poet and greeted by the public as a thing totally unprecedented. In March 1823 the British Critic, a dull, orthodox voice of Church and State that had been sponsoring serial abuses of Byron’s serial epic, paused with the appearance of Cantos III–V for a strangely prescient summation:
To blow hot and cold from every point in the compass, to praise and abuse respectively republics and monarchies; monarchies and republics; to libel and flatter England and America, Buonoparte and Tom Paine, the king and the people, friends and enemies, men and women, truth and justice, backwards and forwards ten times over; to do all this without any excuse or bashfulness within the continent of one work, is really at once a symptom, a proof, and a consequence of an order of intellect, which we have no adequate terms to describe.
If you were (or are) ignorant of the inventory of blistering descriptives on which the British Critic routinely drew, you might take the sentence above as an advertisement for a modernism that had not yet found its critical moment. Looking back in August 1918, just about a century after Byron had begun to map this poetic continent, Virginia Woolf transvalued the symptom, proof and consequence arraigned by the British Critic to declare Don Juan ‘the most readable poem of its length ever written’, attributing this in no small part ‘to the springy random haphazard galloping nature of its method’. With the acuteness of an experimenter in avant-garde, she described the method as ‘a discovery by itself’: Byron found that ‘elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it’ and he knew how to put it in play: ‘He writes 16 cantos without once flogging his flanks… like all free and easy things, only the skilled and mature really bring them off successfully. But Byron was full of ideas – a quality that gives his verse a toughness’ – and a quality that kept her reading late into the night, her only regret, ‘the pleasure of finishing him’. 15
Byron, for his part, left Don Juan unfinished. Canto XVII breaks off just after the poet has recalled Juan and his latest plight. Sexual adventurer Duchess Fitz-Fulke, a female Byron, has dressed up as the ghost of a friar said to haunt Norman Abbey (a country house where she and Juan are both guests) in order to surprise the lad in his bedchamber. The narrative is brazenly farcical, antisentimental, ribald. When Byron heard that women were offended by Don Juan, he was rather glad of the news, giving his doctor in Greece his diagnosis: ‘it took off the veil: it showed that all their d–d sentiment was only an excuse to cover passions of a grosser nature…. it showed and exposed their hypocrisy’. 16 To a worried Murray in 1820 he had opined: ‘The women hate every thing which strips off the tinsel of Sentiment – & they are right – or it would rob them of their weapons’ (BLJ VII 202), and in 1821 he was cheering the poetry that ‘strips off this illusion’ as his counterattack, defying ‘the wish of all women to exalt the sentiment of the passions – & to keep up the illusion which is their empire’ (BLJ VIII 148).
Yet nothing is more Byronic about Don Juan than the vibration of these attacks along a web of affiliations, even sympathy, with the female heart – a move against the tradition of Don Juan that is decidedly ‘new’. Juan’s first lover Donna Julia seals her farewell letter to him with a ‘motto, cut upon a white cornelian’: Elle vous suit partout [She follows you everywhere] (I 198); and the poet of Don Juan lets us wonder if this is just she-sentiment, even cant. But Byron himself knew better, having taken the motto from a heart-shaped cornelian given to him by his Cambridge passion, choirboy John Edleston, whom he called ‘my Cornelian’ (see BLJ I 124). Stripping off the sentiment was a self-cure as much as anything, and indulging it was a self-confession as much as anything else. From Donna Julia onwards, the Byronic hero of Regency fame is not so much put to rest as transla
ted into female form. In boyish Juan and in the wry narrator of Don Juan, the hero flickers into parody. But in the heroines, the romance burns on: Julia, lovelorn and exiled to life-in-death; Haidée, lovelorn unto madness and death; Lady Adeline, ‘playing her grand role’ in ‘weariness or scorn’ (XVI 96), even mysterious, inscrutable Aurora Raby of the final cantos. The narrator of Don Juan may ‘want a hero’, but the author of Don Juan wants a heroine.
It is this contradictory romance – of male and female, hero and heroine – that Byron’s last stanzas entertain. The fragment of Canto XVII begins in conversation about (successively) the varieties of childhood situations (orphans, the only child, parish children), the pleasures of liberal discussion, sacraments, witches, bitches, Galileo’s heresy and vindication, and the poet’s bilious nature – a nature so changeable that he is inclined almost to ‘think that the same skin / For one without has two or three within’ (11). He then recalls one of his skins within, or kin, the poem’s increasingly expendable hero (as this appears in his manuscript):
Our Hero was – in Canto the Sixteenth –
Left in a tender Moonlight situation –
Such as enables Man to show his strength –
Moral or Physical; – on this occasion
Whether his Virtue triumphed – or at length –
His Vice – for he was of a kindling Nation –
Is more than I shall venture to describe –
Unless some Beauty with a kiss should bribe. – (12)
Byron arrays the ors – moral or physical; virtue or vice – but only to perplex the definitions and alignments, and not the least, the outcome. He enters the game of or himself, withholding poetry, or relenting only in the seduction of a she-Beauty, the muse of intrigue. With male coyness and female arts thus perplexed, the poet will say only, ‘I leave the thing a problem, like all things’ (13). Yet between the whim of Beauty’s bribe and the determination to leave the thing a problem, shimmers a manuscript ghost, a crossed-out stanza about the epic’s erotic inspirations and muse:
But Oh! that I were dead – for while alive – –
Would that I neer had loved – – Oh Woman – woman –
All that I writ[e] or wrote can neer revive –
To paint a sole sensation – though quite common –
Of those in which the Body seemed to drive
My Soul from out me at thy single summon –
Expiring in the hope of sensation – 17
‘Expiring in the hope of sensation’ dangles, grammatically and conceptually, as a modifier of all things, and contradictorily: sensation, Body, Soul, me. The sensationalist sets the subtle punning of ‘soul’ surrender to ‘sole sensation’ into a syntax that cannot say with certainty whether the summons will lead to the consummation devoutly to be wished, or leave him expiring in the mere hope of it. This is a radically Byronic idealism, a hope that all but requires the unwritten rhyme partner for sensation (deflation? elation? creation? recreation?) to be left in a suspense that forestalls expiration. Instead, Byron turns from the jokey narrative suspense about Juan’s strength and length to a narrative theorizing of ‘problem’ as the nature of ‘all things’. Yet the textual spectre of the stanza survives, to expose a re-experiencing and repression of the perplexities of writing and sensation, of lust and love, body and soul, pleasure and damnation, of knowing better and doing it all over again. It is this rare combination of passion and subversion, adored by readers as various as Percy Shelley and Virginia Woolf, that keeps Don Juan ‘a new one’ for each generation.
SUSAN J. WOLFSON and PETER J. MANNING
NOTES
1. Chambers’ Encyclopaedia (1876) wrote on Kean: ‘He was amongst actors what Byron is amongst poets, and Napoleon among generals.’
2. 6 April 1819; Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, VI105. References hereafter appear parenthetically as BLJ volume, followed by page. Byron’s underlining in his letters is reproduced, but his double quotation marks have been rendered as singles, to match the rest of this volume. For other short-title references in this introduction, see Further Reading.
3. H. Skey Muir, ‘Byroniana’, Notes and Queries (2 February 1884), pp. 81–2; reprinted in Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., His Very Self and Voice, pp. 451–2.
4. For discussions of this word and the way of speaking it denotes, see Christopher Ricks, ‘Byron’, pp. 121–2, and Jerome J. McGann, Byron and Romanticism, pp. 66–70.
5. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II 323, 330, 357–8.
6. Croker to Murray, in Samuel Smiles (ed.), A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1891), I 415.
7. Murray’s unpublished letter is quoted by Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography, III 1040.
8. The information on production and sales has been gleaned from the notes in Jerome J. McGann’s edition of Byron’s Complete Poetical Works, V 716, 736, 753, 762.
9. For the manuscript, see Andrew Nicholson’s edition; for Ney and for Byron’s antipathy to Wellington, see the notes to IX 1 below. Some of Hunt’s 1823 editions set Byron’s note as an endnote to the canto; the one-shilling edition sets it as a footnote, as would Murray’s edition of 1833. On the other matter, an editor’s note just before gives a couplet from a popular song: ‘M. de Vilainton a tout pris, / Point d’argent dans la ville de Paris’ (Monsieur Vilainton has taken all, / No more money in the city of Paris).
10. For more on Cloots’s execution, see Steffan and Pratt’s Variorum Edition, IV 19.
11. For the letter by C.V. (Francis Cohen) to Murray that is Byron’s mediated inspiration, see Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, p. 34; and Peter Cochran, ‘Francis Cohen, Don Juan and Castri’, Romanticism 4:1 (1998), pp. 120–24.
12. For Blackwood’s remarks on Don Juan, see Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford pp. 166–7.
13. Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, I 413.
14. McGann, Complete Poetical Works, V xvii.
15. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1954), pp. 3–4.
16. Muir, ‘Byroniana’, p. 452.
17. See also note to XVII 12^13 below (Nicholson’s edition has ‘resurrection’ as the final word).
Editors’ note
GENESIS OF THE POEM
The impulses that started Byron on Don Juan came from many sources: temperament, reading, personal circumstance, his past and present social environment, and what he thought and felt about them – these and other incentives combined to initiate and sustain his most complex poem… The immediate literary stimulus did not come from the vast international literature about Don Juan, the ravenous and artful seducer. Byron may have seen a pantomime in which the rake was seized by the devil – an adaptation of Shadwell’s gross distortion of the Don Juan story (The Libertine). However, he probably never read Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador, or MoliÈre’s Don Juan, or the Italian plays about this anti-hero and the avenging stone statue. Though he endowed Juan with an ‘air as sentimental as Mozart’s / Softest of melodies’ (XI 47, 3–4), his letters do not mention Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Gluck’s ballet. The literary stimulus for Byron’s venture came from another tradition – Italian burlesque. In Brussels (May 1816), Byron had been given a copy of the Novelle Galanti by Giovanni Battista Casti (1721–1803). This he enjoyed on the road to Switzerland and found superior to Casti’s Animali Parlanti, that he had previously read. Then in late August or early September 1817, Byron received a copy of John Hookham Frere’s Whistlecraft, which imitated the technique of Luigi Pulci (1431–87), a precursor of Casti. Byron was so delighted with Whistlecraft that within a few days he began Beppo. Later he read poems by Pulci and Francesco Berni (1498–1535) and in Ravenna (February 1820) completed a translation of Canto I of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. Thus a major incentive for Don Juan was Byron’s admiration of these Italian burlesque
writers, whose flexible ottava rima… suited his own literary tastes and needs. 1 These novelties enabled Byron to boast that they would show John Murray, his publisher, and others that he could write cheerfully, and would repel the charge of monotony and mannerism. He also promised Murray that if Beppo sold well he would try another poem in the same style. Encouraged by a favourable report from Murray in June 1818 about the brisk sales, he began the first canto of Don Juan in July. 2 …
THIS EDITION
The basis of the Penguin text of Don Juan is the second (1971) Variorum edition. The latter is a reproduction of the first editions of the sixteen cantos (1819–24), modified to include (1) the corrections that Byron marked on copies of the defective 1821 edition of Cantos III–V and that were made in the 1822 edition; (2) several verbal innovations that appeared in volumes XV–XVII of the 1832–3 Works of Lord Byron, prepared by John Wright for John Murray and issued with Thomas Moore’s Life; (3) some clarifying emendations that were made for the 1957 and 1971 Variorums after repeated collation of the manuscripts with the first editions and with three twentieth-century editions: those of E. H. Coleridge (1903); P. E. More, The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron (1905); and L. I. Bredvold, Lord Byron. Don Juan and other Satirical Poems (1935). The preparation of the Penguin text involved a consultation of the manuscripts, and the occasional adoption of their phrasing, which had been merely recorded among the variants in 1957 and 1971. Though infrequent, these deviations distinguish the present text from the Variorum and from that of other recent or traditional publications.
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