Don Juan
Page 28
With regard to the objections which have been made on another score to the already published cantos of this poem, I shall content myself with two quotations from Voltaire: La pudeur s’est enfuite des coeurs, et s’est refugiée sur les lèvres. Plus les moeurs sont dépravés, plus les expressions deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu’ on a perdu en vertu.
This is the real fact, as applicable to the degraded and hypocritical mass which leavens the present English generation, and is the only answer they deserve. The hackneyed and lavished title of blasphemer – which, with radical, liberal, Jacobin, reformer, etc., are the changes which the hirelings are daily ringing in the ears of those who will listen – should be welcome to all who recollect on whom it was originally bestowed. Socrates and Jesus Christ were put to death publicly as blasphemers, and so have been and may be many who dare to oppose the most notorious abuses of the name of God and the mind of man. But persecution is not refutation, nor even triumph; the ‘wretched infidel’, as he is called, is probably happier in his prison than the proudest of his assailants. With his opinions I have nothing to do – they may be right or wrong – but he has suffered for them, and that very suffering for conscience sake will make more proselytes to Deism than the example of heterodox prelates to Christianity, suicide statesmen to oppression, or over-pensioned homicides to the impious Alliance which insults the world with the name of ‘Holy’! I have no wish to trample on the dishonoured or the dead; but it would be well if the adherents to the classes from whence those persons sprung should abate a little of the cant which is the crying sin of this double-dealing and false-speaking time of selfish spoilers, and – but enough for the present.
Canto VI
1
‘There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood’ – you know the rest,
And most of us have found it now and then;
At least we think so, though but few have guessed
The moment, till too late to come again.
But no doubt everything is for the best,
Of which the surest sign is in the end;
When things are at the worst they sometimes mend.
2
There is a tide in the affairs of women
‘Which taken at the flood leads’ – God knows where.
Those navigators must be able seamen
Whose charts lay down its currents to a hair.
Not all the reveries of Jacob Behmen
With its strange whirls and eddies can compare.
Men with their heads reflect on this and that,
But women with their hearts or heaven knows what!
3
And yet a headlong, headstrong, downright she,
Young, beautiful, and daring, who would risk
A throne, the world, the universe to be
Beloved in her own way, and rather whisk
The stars from out the sky than not be free
As are the billows when the breeze is brisk –
Though such a she’s a devil (if that there be one),
Yet she would make full many a Manichean.
4
Thrones, worlds, et cetera, are so oft upset
By commonest ambition that when passion
O’erthrows the same, we readily forget
Or at the least forgive the loving rash one.
If Anthony be well remembered yet,
’Tis not his conquests keep his name in fashion,
But Actium lost; for Cleopatra’s eyes
Outbalance all the Caesar’s victories.
5
He died at fifty for a queen of forty;
I wish their years had been fifteen and twenty,
For then wealth, kingdoms, worlds are but a sport. I
Remember when, though I had no great plenty
Of worlds to lose, yet still, to pay my court, I
Gave what I had – a heart. As the world went, I
Gave what was worth a world; for worlds could never
Restore me those pure feelings, gone forever.
6
’Twas the boy’s ‘mite’, and like the ‘widow’s’ may
Perhaps be weighed hereafter, if not now;
But whether such things do or do not weigh,
All who have loved or love will still allow
Life has nought like it. God is love, they say,
And Love’s a God, or was before the brow
Of Earth was wrinkled by the sins and tears
Of – but chronology best knows the years.
7
We left our hero and third heroine in
A kind of state more awkward than uncommon,
For gentlemen must sometimes risk their skin
For that sad tempter, a forbidden woman.
Sultans too much abhor this sort of sin,
And don’t agree at all with the wise Roman,
Heroic, stoic Cato, the sententious,
Who lent his lady to his friend Hortensius.
8
I know Gulbeyaz was extremely wrong;
I own it, I deplore it, I condemn it,
But I detest all fiction even in song
And so must tell the truth, howe’er you blame it
Her reason being weak, her passions strong,
She thought that her lord’s heart (even could she claim it)
Was scarce enough; for he had fifty-nine
Years and a fifteen-hundredth concubine.
9
I am not, like Cassio, ‘an arithmetician’,
But by ‘the bookish theoric’ it appears,
If ’tis summed up with feminine precision,
That adding to the account His Highness’ years,
The fair Sultana erred from inanition;
For were the Sultan just to all his dears,
She could but claim the fifteen-hundredth part
Of what should be monopoly – the heart.
10
It is observed that ladies are litigious
Upon all legal objects of possession
And not the least so when they are religious,
Which doubles what they think of the transgression.
With suits and prosecutions they besiege us,
As the tribunals show through many a session,
When they suspect that anyone goes shares
In that to which the law makes them sole heirs.
11
Now if this holds good in a Christian land,
The heathen also, though with lesser latitude,
Are apt to carry things with a high hand
And take what kings call ‘an imposing attitude’
And for their rights connubial make a stand,
When their liege husbands treat them with ingratitude.
And as four wives must have quadruple claims,
The Tigris hath its jealousies like Thames.
12
Gulbeyaz was the fourth and (as I said)
The favourite, but what’s favour amongst four?
Polygamy may well be held in dread,
Not only as a sin, but as a bore.
Most wise men with one moderate woman wed
Will scarcely find philosophy for more;
And all (except Mahometans) forbear
To make the nuptial couch a ‘bed of Ware’.
13
His Highness, the sublimest of mankind –
So styled according to the usual forms
Of every monarch, till they are consigned
To those sad hungry Jacobins the worms,
Who on the very loftiest kings have dined –
His Highness gazed upon Gulbeyaz’ charms,
Expecting all the welcome of a lover
(A ‘Highland welcome’ all the wide world over).
14
Now here we should distinguish; for howe’er
Kisses, sweet words, embraces, and all that
May look like what is – neither her
e nor there,
They are put on as easily as a hat
Or rather bonnet, which the fair sex wear,
Trimmed either heads or hearts to decorate,
Which form an ornament, but no more part
Of heads than their caresses of the heart.
15
A slight blush, a soft tremor, a calm kind
Of gentle feminine delight and shown
More in the eyelids than the eyes, resigned
Rather to hide what pleases most unknown,
Are the best tokens (to a modest mind)
Of love, when seated on his loveliest throne,
A sincere woman’s breast, for over warm
Or over cold annihilates the charm.
16
For over warmth, if false, is worse than truth.
If true, ‘tis no great lease of its own fire,
For no one, save in very early youth,
Would like (I think) to trust all to desire,
Which is but a precarious bond in sooth
And apt to be transferred to the first buyer
At a sad discount; while your over chilly
Women, on t’other hand, seem somewhat silly.
17
That is, we cannot pardon their bad taste,
For so it seems to lovers swift or slow,
Who fain would have a mutual flame confest
And see a sentimental passion glow,
Even were St Francis’ paramour their guest
In his monastic concubine of snow.
In short, the maxim for the amorous tribe is
Horatian: medio tu tutissimus ibis.
18
The ‘tu’ ’s too much, but let it stand; the verse
Requires it, that’s to say, the English rhyme,
And not the pink of old hexameters.
But after all there’s neither tune nor time
In the last line, which cannot well be worse,
And was thrust in to close the octave’s chime.
I own no prosody can ever rate it
As a rule, but truth may, if you translate it.
19
If fair Gulbeyaz overdid her part,
I know not; it succeeded, and success
Is much in most things, not less in the heart
Than other articles of female dress.
Self-love in man too beats all female art;
They lie, we lie, all lie, but love no less.
And no one virtue yet except starvation
Could stop that worst of vices – propagation.
20
We leave this royal couple to repose;
A bed is not a throne, and they may sleep,
Whate’er their dreams be, if of joys or woes.
Yet disappointed joys are woes as deep
As any man’s clay mixture undergoes.
Our least of sorrows are such as we weep;
’Tis the vile daily drop on drop which wears
The soul out (like the stone) with petty cares.
21
A scolding wife, a sullen son, a bill
To pay, unpaid, protested, or discounted
At a percentage, a child cross, dog ill,
A favourite horse fallen lame just as he’s mounted,
A bad old woman making a worse will,
Which leaves you minus of the cash you counted
As certain – these are paltry things, and yet
I’ve rarely seen the man they did not fret.
22
I’m a philosopher; confound them all!
Bills, beasts, and men, and – no, not womankind!
With one good hearty curse I vent my gall,
And then my stoicism leaves nought behind
Which it can either pain or evil call,
And I can give my whole soul up to mind;
Though what is soul or mind, their birth or growth
Is more than I know – the deuce take them both.
23
So now all things are damned, one feels at ease,
As after reading Athanasius’ curse,
Which doth your true believer so much please.
I doubt if any now could make it worse
O’er his worst enemy when at his knees;
’Tis so sententious, positive, and terse
And decorates The Book of Common Prayer,
As doth a rainbow the just clearing air.
24
Gulbeyaz and her lord were sleeping, or
At least one of them. Oh the heavy night!
When wicked wives who love some bachelor
Lie down in dudgeon to sigh for the light
Of the grey morning and look vainly for
Its twinkle through the lattice dusky quite,
To toss, to tumble, doze, revive, and quake
Lest their too lawful bedfellow should wake.
25
These are beneath the canopy of heaven,
Also beneath the canopy of beds
Four-posted and silk curtained, which are given
For rich men and their brides to lay their heads
Upon, in sheets white as what bards call ‘driven
Snow’. Well! ‘tis all haphazard when one weds.
Gulbeyaz was an empress, but had been
Perhaps as wretched if a peasant’s quean.
26
Don Juan in his feminine disguise,
With all the damsels in their long array,
Had bowed themselves before the imperial eyes
And at the usual signal ta’en their way
Back to their chambers, those long galleries
In the seraglio, where the ladies lay
Their delicate limbs, a thousand bosoms there
Beating for love as the caged birds for air.
27
I love the sex and sometimes would reverse
The tyrant’s wish ‘that mankind only had
One neck, which he with one fell stroke might pierce.’
My wish is quite as wide, but not so bad
And much more tender on the whole than fierce,
It being (not now, but only while a lad)
That womankind had but one rosy mouth,
To kiss them all at once from north to south.
28
Oh enviable Briareus with thy hands
And heads, if thou hadst all things multiplied
In such proportion! But my Muse withstands
The giant thought of being a Titan’s bride
Or travelling in Patagonian lands.
So let us back to Lilliput and guide
Our hero through the labyrinth of love
In which we left him several lines above.
29
He went forth with the lovely odalisques,
At the given signal joined to their array.
And though he certainly ran many risks,
Yet he could not at times keep, by the way
(Although the consequences of such frisks
Are worse than the worst damages men pay
In moral England, where the thing’s a tax),
From ogling all their charms from breasts to backs.
30
Still he forgot not his disguise. Along
The galleries from room to room they walked,
A virgin-like and edifying throng,
By eunuchs flanked, while at their head there stalked
A dame, who kept up discipline among
The female ranks so that none stirred or talked
Without her sanction on their she-parades.
Her title was ‘the Mother of the Maids’.
31
Whether she was a mother, I know not,
Or whether they were maids who called her mother,
But this is her seraglio title, got
I know not how, but good as any other;
So Cantemir can tell you, or De Tott.
Her office was to keep aloof or smother
All
bad propensities in fifteen hundred
Young women and correct them when they blundered.
32
A goodly sinecure no doubt, but made
More easy by the absence of all men
Except His Majesty, who with her aid
And guards and bolts and walls and now and then
A slight example, just to cast a shade
Along the rest, contrived to keep this den
Of beauties cool as an Italian convent,
Where all the passions have, alas, but one vent.
33
And what is that? Devotion, doubtless – how
Could you ask such a question? But we will
Continue. As I said, this goodly row
Of ladies of all countries at the will
Of one good man, with stately march and slow,
Like water lilies floating down a rill
(Or rather lake, for rills do not run slowly),
Paced on most maiden-like and melancholy.
34
But when they reached their own apartments, there
Like birds or boys or bedlamites broke loose,
Waves at spring tide, or women anywhere
When freed from bonds (which are of no great use
After all), or like Irish at a fair,
Their guards being gone, and as it were a truce
Established between them and bondage, they
Began to sing, dance, chatter, smile and play.
35
Their talk of course ran most on the newcomer,
Her shape, her hair, her air, her everything.
Some thought her dress did not so much become her
Or wondered at her ears without a ring;
Some said her years were getting nigh their summer;
Others contended they were but in spring;
Some thought her rather masculine in height,
While others wished that she had been so quite.
36
But no one doubted on the whole that she
Was what her dress bespoke, a damsel fair
And fresh and ‘beautiful exceedingly’,
Who with the brightest Georgians might compare.