Which’tis the common cry and lie to vaunt as
A moral country? But I hold my hand,
For I disdain to write an Atalantis.
But’tis as well at once to understand:
You are not a moral people, and you know it
Without the aid of too sincere a poet.
88
What Juan saw and underwent shall be
My topic with of course the due restriction
Which is required by proper courtesy.
And recollect the work is only fiction
And that I sing of neither mine nor me,
Though every scribe in some slight turn of diction
Will hint allusions never meant. Ne’er doubt
This: when I speak, I don’t hint, but speak out.
89
Whether he married with the third or fourth
Offspring of some sage, husband-hunting countess,
Or whether with some virgin of more worth
(I mean in Fortune’s matrimonial bounties)
He took to regularly peopling earth,
Of which your lawful awful wedlock fount is,
Or whether he was taken in for damages
For being too excursive in his homages
90
Is yet within the unread events of time.
Thus far go forth, thou lay, which I will back
Against the same given quantity of rhyme,
For being as much the subject of attack
As ever yet was any work sublime
By those who love to say that white is black.
So much the better. I may stand alone,
But would not change my free thoughts for a throne.
Canto XII
1
Of all the barbarous Middle Ages, that
Which is the most barbarous is the middle age
Of man. It is – I really scarce know what;
But when we hover between fool and sage
And don’t know justly what we would be at,
A period something like a printed page,
Black letter upon foolscap, while our hair
Grows grizzled and we are not what we were,
2
Too old for youth, too young at thirty-fivey
To herd with boys or hoard with good threescore.
I wonder people should be left alive,
But since they are, that epoch is a bore.
Love lingers still, although ‘twere late to wive,
And as for other love, the illusion’s o’er;
And money, that most pure imagination,
Gleams only through the dawn of its creation.
3
Oh gold! Why call we misers miserable?
Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall.
Theirs is the best bower-anchor, the chain cable
Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.
Ye who but see the saving man at table
And scorn his temperate board as none at all
And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing
Know not what visions spring from each cheese-paring.
4
Love or lust makes man sick, and wine much sicker.
Ambition rends, and gaming gains a loss.
But making money, slowly first, then quicker,
And adding still a little through each cross
(Which will come over things) beats love or liquor,
The gamester’s counter or the statesman’s dross.
Oh gold! I still prefer thee unto paper,
Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour.
5
Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign
O’er congress, whether royalist or liberal?
Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain,
That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all?
Who keep the world, both old and new, in pain
Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?
The shade of Bonaparte’s noble daring?
Jew Rothschild and his fellow Christian Baring.
6
Those and the truly liberal Lafitte
Are the true lords of Europe. Every loan
Is not a merely speculative hit,
But seats a nation or upsets a throne.
Republics also get involved a bit:
Columbia’s stock hath holders not unknown
On ‘Change, and even thy silver soil, Peru,
Must get itself discounted by a Jew.
7
Why call the miser miserable? As
I said before, the frugal life is his,
Which in a saint or cynic ever was
The theme of praise. A hermit would not miss
Canonization for the selfsame cause,
And wherefore blame gaunt Wealth’s austerities?
Because, you’ll say, nought calls for such a trial;
Then there’s more merit in his self-denial.
8
He is your only poet. Passion, pure
And sparkling on from heap to heap, displays,
Possessed, the ore, of which mere hopes allure
Nations athwart the deep. The golden rays
Flash up in ingots from the mine obscure.
On him the diamond pours its brilliant blaze,
While the mild emerald’s beam shades down the dyes
Of other stones, to soothe the miser’s eyes.
9
The lands on either side are his; the ship
From Ceylon, Inde, or far Cathay unloads
For him the fragrant produce of each trip.
Beneath his cars of Ceres groan the roads,
And the vine blushes like Aurora’s lip.
His very cellars might be kings’ abodes,
While he, despising every sensual call,
Commands – the intellectual lord of all.
10
Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind
To build a college or to found a race,
A hospital, a church, and leave behind
Some dome surmounted by his meagre face.
Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind
Even with the very ore which makes them base.
Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation
Or revel in the joys of calculation.
11
But whether all or each or none of these
May be the hoarder’s principle of action,
The fool will call such mania a disease.
What is his own? Go look at each transaction,
Wars, revels, loves. Do these bring men more ease
Than the mere plodding through each ‘vulgar fraction’?
Or do they benefit mankind? Lean miser,
Let spendthrifts’ heirs inquire of yours – who’s wiser?
12
How beauteous are rouleaus! How charming chests,
Containing ingots, bags of dollars, coins
(Not of old victors, all whose heads and crests
Weigh not the thin ore where their visage shines,
But) of fine unclipt gold, where dully rests
Some likeness, which the glittering cirque confines,
Of modern, reigning, sterling, stupid stamp.
Yes! ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.
13
‘Love rules the camp, the court, the grove,’ ‘for love
Is heaven, and heaven is love.’ So sings the bard,
Which it were rather difficult to prove
(A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in the grove;
(At least it rhymes to ‘love’), but I’m prepared
To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)
If courts and camps be quite so sentimental.
14
But if love don’t, cash does, and cash alone.
Cash rules the grove and fells it too besides.
Without cash, camps were
thin, and courts were none.
Without cash, Malthus tells you, ‘take no brides’.
So cash rules love the ruler, on his own
High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides.
And as for heaven being love, why not say honey
Is wax? Heaven is not love,’tis matrimony.
15
Is not all love prohibited whatever,
Excepting marriage? which is love no doubt
After a sort, but somehow people never
With the same thought the two words have helped out.
Love may exist with marriage and should ever,
And marriage also may exist without,
But love sans banns is both a sin and shame
And ought to go by quite another name.
16
Now if the court and camp and grove be not
Recruited all with constant married men,
Who never coveted their neighbour’s lot,
I say that line’s a lapsus of the pen.
Strange too in my buon camerado Scott,
So celebrated for his morals, when
My Jeffrey held him up as an example
To me, of which these morals are a sample.
17
Well, if I don’t succeed, I have succeeded,
And that’s enough; succeeded in my youth,
The only time when much success is needed.
And my success produced what I in sooth
Cared most about. It need not now be pleaded;
Whate’er it was, ‘twas mine. I’ve paid, in truth,
Of late the penalty of such success,
But have not learned to wish it any less.
18
That suit in Chancery, which some persons plead
In an appeal to the unborn, whom they,
In the faith of their procreative creed,
Baptize posterity or future clay,
To me seems but a dubious kind of reed
To lean on for support in any way,
Since odds are that posterity will know
No more of them than they of her, I trow.
19
Why, I’m posterity and so are you;
And whom do we remember? Not a hundred.
Were every memory written down all true,
The tenth or twentieth name would be but blundered.
Even Plutarch’s Lives have but picked out a few,
And ‘gainst those few your annalists have thundered;
And Mitford in the nineteenth century
Gives with Greek truth the good old Greek the lie.
20
Good people all of every degree,
Ye gentle readers and ungentle writers,
In this twelfth canto’tis my wish to be
As serious as if I had for inditers
Malthus and Wilberforce. The last set free
The Negroes and is worth a million fighters,
While Wellington has but enslaved the whites,
And Malthus does the thing ‘gainst which he writes.
21
I’m serious; so are all men upon paper.
And why should I not form my speculation
And hold up to the sun my little taper?
Mankind just now seem wrapt in meditation
On constitutions and steamboats of vapour,
While sages write against all procreation,
Unless a man can calculate his means
Of feeding brats the moment his wife weans.
22
That’s noble! That’s romantic! For my part
I think that philo-genitiveness is
(Now here’s a word quite after my own heart,
Though there’s a shorter a good deal than this,
If that politeness set it not apart,
But I’m resolved to say nought that’s amiss.) –
I say, methinks that philo-genitiveness
Might meet from men a little more forgiveness.
23
And now to business. Oh my gentle Juan!
Thou art in London, in that pleasant place
Where every kind of mischief’s daily brewing
Which can await warm youth in its wild race.
’Tis true that thy career is not a new one;
Thou art no novice in the headlong chase
Of early life, but this is a new land,
Which foreigners can never understand.
24
What with a small diversity of climate,
Of hot or cold, mercurial or sedate,
I could send forth my mandate like a primate
Upon the rest of Europe’s social state.
But thou art the most difficult to rhyme at,
Great Britain, which the Muse may penetrate.
All countries have their lions, but in thee
There is but one superb menagerie.
25
But I am sick of politics. Begin,
Paulo majora. Juan, undecided
Amongst the paths of being taken in,
Above the ice had like a skater glided.
When tired of play, he flirted without sin
With some of those fair creatures who have prided
Themselves on innocent tantalization,
And hate all vice except its reputation.
26
But these are few, and in the end they make
Some devilish escapade or stir, which shows
That even the purest people may mistake
Their way through virtue’s primrose paths of snows.
And then men stare, as if a new ass spake
To Balaam, and from tongue to ear o’erflows
Quicksilver small talk, ending (if you note it)
With the kind world’s amen: ‘Who would have thought it?’
27
The little Leila with her orient eyes
And taciturn Asiatic disposition
(Which saw all Western things with small surprise,
To the surprise of people of condition,
Who think that novelties are butterflies
To be pursued as food for inanition),
Her charming figure and romantic history
Became a kind of fashionable mystery.
28
The women much divided, as is usual
Amongst the sex in little things or great.
Think not, fair creatures, that I mean to abuse you all;
I have always liked you better than I state.
Since I’ve grown moral, still I must accuse you all
Of being apt to talk at a great rate;
And now there was a general sensation
Amongst you about Leila’s education.
29
In one point only were you settled, and
You had reason; ‘twas that a young child of grace,
As beautiful as her own native land
And far away, the last bud of her race,
Howe’er our friend Don Juan might command
Himself for five, four, three, or two years’ space,
Would be much better taught beneath the eye
Of peeresses whose follies had run dry.
30
So first there was a generous emulation,
And then there was a general competition
To undertake the orphan’s education.
As Juan was a person of condition,
It had been an affront on this occasion
To talk of a subscription or petition;
But sixteen dowagers, ten unwed she sages,
Whose tale belongs to Hallam’s Middle Ages,
31
And one or two sad, separate wives, without
A fruit to bloom upon their withering bough,
Begged to bring up the little girl, and out,
For that’s the phrase that settles all things now,
Meaning a virgin’s first blush at a rout,
And all her points as thoroughbred to show.
Tastes their first season (mostly if they have money).
32
How all the needy honourable misters,
Each out-at-elbow peer or desperate dandy,
The watchful mothers and the careful sisters
(Who, by the by, when clever, are more handy
At making matches, where ‘’tis gold that glisters’,
Than their he-relatives) like flies o’er candy
Buzz round ‘the Fortune’ with their busy battery,
To turn her head with waltzing and with flattery.
33
Each aunt, each cousin hath her speculation.
Nay, married dames will now and then discover
Such pure disinterestedness of passion,
I’ve known them court an heiress for their lover.
‘Tantaene!’ Such the virtues of high station
Even in the hopeful isle, whose outlet’s Dover,
While the poor rich wretch, object of these cares,
Has cause to wish her sire had had male heirs.
34
Some are soon bagged, but some reject three dozen.
’Tis fine to see them scattering refusals
And wild dismay o’er every angry cousin
(Friends of the party) who begin accusals,
Such as: ‘Unless Miss Blank meant to have chosen
Poor Frederick, why did she accord perusals
To his billets? Why waltz with him? Why, I pray,
Look yes last night and yet say no today?
35
‘Why? Why? Besides, Fred really was attached.
‘Twas not her fortune; he has enough without.
The time will come she’ll wish that she had snatched
So good an opportunity no doubt.
But the old marchioness some plan has hatched,
As I’ll tell Aurea at tomorrow’s rout.
And after all poor Frederick may do better.
Pray did you see her answer to his letter?’
36
Smart uniforms and sparkling coronets
Are spurned in turn, until her turn arrives,
After male loss of time and hearts and bets
Upon the sweepstakes for substantial wives.
And when at last the pretty creature gets
Some gentleman who fights or writes or drives,
It soothes the awkward squad of the rejected
To find how very badly she selected.
37
For sometimes they accept some long pursuer,
Worn out with importunity, or fall
(But here perhaps the instances are fewer)
To the lot of him who scarce pursued at all.
A hazy widower turned of forty’s sure
(If’tis not vain examples to recall)
To draw a high prize. Now, howe’er he got her, I
I See nought more strange in this than t’other lottery.
38
I for my part (one ‘modern instance’ more,
‘True’tis a pity, pity’tis,’tis true’)
Don Juan Page 43