Don Juan
Page 57
30–31 This rustic Gongora and vulgar Marini Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627) introduced an affected diction and style into Spanish literature, hence Gongorism. Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), a Neapolitan poet, was notable for his flamboyance and bad taste.
38 from Count Cagliostro to Madame Krudner Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), assumed name of Giuseppe Balsamo, an Italian impostor, carried on a lively business in his ‘elixir of immortal youth’. Baroness von Krüdener (1768–1824) was converted to her mystical mission by a Moravian shoemaker in 1804 at Riga (Russia). Believing that a man from the north would destroy Antichrist (Napoleon), she carried her gospel over Europe for eleven years and gained a large following. In June 1815 she was granted an interview with the Tsar Alexander I and preached to him for three hours. She went with the Tsar to Paris and was one of the initiators of his Holy Alliance (see note to Preface to Cantos VI–VIII 76–7). Alexander soon tired of her and would not let her return to Russia until 1820. When he asked her to leave St Petersburg, she formed a pietistic colony in the Crimea and died there.
45–6 this Thraso of poetry has long been a Gnatho Thraso, the braggart soldier; Gnatho, the parasite, in Terence’s Eunuchus .
46–8 may be met in print at… several trunkmakers It was a traditional joke that makers of luggage lined their trunks with bad poetry that publishers could not sell. See note to Canto II 16, 8.
48 at dinner at Lord Lonsdale’s After ‘Lord Lonsdale’s’ Byron deleted the following:
Lord Lonsdale Through the influence of William Lowther, first Earl of Lonsdale (1757–1844), Wordsworth obtained the office of Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmorland in March 1813.
50 Misery, oh misery
And to herself she cries,
‘Oh misery! oh misery!
Oh woe is me! oh misery’
(The Thorn 64–6)
53 told by a Spanish gentleman W. A. Borst traces Byron’s ‘pleasant tableau’ of the Spanish gentleman in the Sierra Morena to a night that Byron and Hobhouse spent at Monastereo in 1809 (Lord Byron’s First Pilgrimage (1948), 23–5).
55 posada Spanish inn or hotel.
58 olla-podrida A highly seasoned dish of meat and vegetables cooked in a bulging wide-mouthed pot.
83–4 the Liberals… so liberally rewarded by Ferdinand When Ferdinand VII of Spain was restored to his throne in 1814, with the aid of Wellington and the British, he instituted harsh anti-liberal measures. See note to Dedication 14, 5.
96 Walter Tyler Robert Southey’s revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, was written when he was nineteen but was not published until twenty-two years later (1817), when it was pirated and widely sold, much to his embarrassment.
101 post-obits A bond, payable after someone’s death, made to secure payment of a loan with interest. Byron here and in 1103, 8, and XVII 9, 8, used the word figuratively, but literally in I 125, 8. The idea that poets cherish the fame of posterity Byron both ridiculed and relied upon: Dedication 9; XII 18–19.
117 a gross calumny Byron had been told that Southey had called the association of the Shelleys, Claire Clairmont and himself in Switzerland (1816) a ‘league of incest’(LJ IV 271–2).
117–18 Pantisocratic apostle Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Southey planned in 1794–5 to try on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania an ‘experiment of human perfectability’. This Utopian society they called Pantisocracy. In Coleridge’s sonnet, Pantisocracy, he hoped for an end of shame and anguish and anticipated the dell where calm virtue could stray carelessly and dance in the moonlight and where the ‘wizard passions’ wove ‘an holy spell’.
126 After the last sentence Byron deleted the following fragment:
DEDICATION
Unless otherwise noted, all variants are taken from PM, Byron’s first draft of Canto I, of which Dedication stanzas 1–2, 4–10 and 17 are the first ten stanzas. Since the first page is dated 3 July 1818, these are the earliest written stanzas Don Juan. BM, first draft of stanzas 3 and 11–16, was written later than PM and finished by early November. M, Byron’s fair copy, finished before 11 November, has stanzas 1–17, of which 12–16 are deleted. When Byron and his publisher Murray decided to issue the first two cantos anonymously, Byron directed that the Dedication be omitted from the first edition. It was printed in the 1833 edition.
1, 1 poet laureate In 1813, Southey accepted the laureateship, which had previously been offered to Scott after the death of Pye. See Appendix.
1, 3 you turned out a Tory Byron despised Southey for seeking to atone for his early revolutionary sins by a violent condemnation of republicanism.
1, 5 my epic renegade ]
1, 7– 2, 4 A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye / Like ‘four and twenty blackbirds in a pye,/… such kind of food Henry James Pye (1745–1813) was appointed laureate in 1790 as a reward for his praise of the royal family. His first official ode, that honoured the King’s birthday, referred to ‘vocal groves and feathered choir’ and provoked a jest from the Shakespearean editor George Steevens: ‘And when the PYE was opened the birds began to sing; Was not that a dainty dish to set before the King?’ This joke became so well known that people thought Steevens had written the old nursery rhyme (Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1952), 394. See also the note by W. C Childers, Keats–Shelley Journal, XII (1963), 9). Later, in The Vision of Judgment, Byron gave the blind old George III only one remark (st. 92); when Southey began to recite, the King cried: ‘ “What! what! Pye come again? No more – no more of that!” ’Byron had scoffed at Pye’s verse in the notes to Hints from Horace and EB & SR, and wrote in the latter poem: ‘Better to err with Pope, than shine with Pye’ (102).
2, 6–8 a hawk encumbered with his hood, /… explain his explanation For one cause of Byron’s attack on Coleridge see his letter to Murray, 12 October 1817: ‘In Coleridge’s Life [ Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 23 ], I perceive an attack upon the then Committee of D. L. Theatre for acting Bertram, and an attack upon Maturin’s Bertram for being acted.… The play he offered, though poetical, did not appear at all practicable, and Bertram did; – and hence this long tirade, which is the last chapter of his vagabond life.… He is a shabby fellow, and I wash my hands of and after him’(LJ IV 171–2).
The reference in line 8 of the stanza may be to Coleridge’s ‘explanation’ of German philosophical idealism in Biographia Literaria.
3, 8 And fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob The pun on ‘Bob’ associated Robert Southey’s name with the meaning of ‘dry bob’ in Regency slang: coition without emission (Marchand, II 763 n.). Byron scorned in Southey the self-contradiction of a straining pretentiousness that produced only lifelessness.
4 Byron sent his publisher a stanza to be inserted after this one. When the Dedication was suppressed, he later used that insertion as stanza 95 of Canto III.
4, 4 his new system to perplex the sages Although Wordsworth in the Preface to The Excursion (1814) disavows any intention of formally announcing a system, he does say that ‘the Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself’.
4, 5 ]
4, 6 when the Dog Star rages Maxwell (NQ, 302) noted that Pope in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 3–4 wrote: ‘The dog-star rages! nay, ’tis past a doubt, / All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out.’
5, 1–5 ]
At Keswick – and still flattering one another
Have shrunk into a Spirit unforgiving>
Sweep in any less neglected brother –
This is but petty work> fragment
6, 2 ] Nor
6, 6 Wordsworth… Excise ‘Wordsworth’s
place may be in the Customs… or the Excise – besides another at Lord Lonsdale’s table, where this poetical charlatan and political parasite licks up the crumbs with a hardened alacrity; the converted Jacobin having long subsided into the clownish sycophant of the worst prejudices of the aristocracy’ (Byron, 1833).
See note to Preface to Cantos I and II 48.
7, 4 engross monopolize.
7, 7 Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe will try Byron’s Gradus ad Parnassum of 1813 places Scott as the ‘monarch of Parnassus’, Rogers ‘next in the living list’, ‘Moore and Campbell both third’. Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge are reserved for the two bottom compartments of the triangle. Crabbe, who does not appear, was usually included in Byron’s lists of the poets he admired (LJ II 343–4).
9, 2 Who… claim the bright reversion If the antecedent of ‘Who’ is ‘posterity’ (line 1), then ‘reversion’ may have a legal meaning: posterity does not often claim the estate (the laurels of fame) that the poet left to his heirs (posterity); that is, the fame he reserved for the future vanishes. Byron returns to legal imagery in line 7 of this stanza. Maxwell (NQ, 302) noted that Pope used ‘bright reversion’ in the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady 9.
9, 6 Arise like Titan Helios, the sun-god, called Titan by the Latin poets, rises in the morning from the ocean, drives his chariot across the heavens, and descends at evening into the western sea.
10, 1–2 If fallen in evil days on evil tongues Milton appealed to the avenger, Time Milton in Paradise Lost wrote: ‘… though fall’n on evil days, On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues’ (VII 25–6). The allusion to Milton’s appeal to ‘the avenger, Time’ may refer to the passage immediately following these lines. There Milton hopes that a ‘fit audience though few’ will remember his poem in future time.
10, 7 loathe the sire to laud the son Milton, who as a Puritan had hated Charles I, did not after the Restoration become an opportunist and praise Charles II.
11, 1–2 arise / Like Samuel from the grave ‘And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth. And he said unto her, What form is he of? and she said, An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it was Samuel’ (I Samuel xxviii 13–14).
11, 6 And heartless daughters – worn and pale and poor ‘“Pale, but not cadaverous.” – Milton’s two elder daughters are said to have robbed him of his books, besides cheating and plaguing him in the economy of his house, &c. &c. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and a scholar, must have been singularly painful’ (Byron, 1833).
11, 7–8 ] Would he subside into a hackney Laureat?
A scribbling self-sold soul-hired scorned Iscariot M
Byron wrote this note on M for the alternative couplet: ‘I doubt if Laureat & Iscariot be good rhymes but must say as Ben Johnson did to Sylvester who challenged him to rhyme with “I, John Sylvester / Lay with your Sister.” Johnson answered – “I Ben Johnson lay with your wife” Sylvester answered “that is not rhyme” – no Said Ben Johnson; “But it is true .”’ See Appendix.
11, 8 The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769–1822), Marquis of Londonderry in 1821, was foreign secretary of England (1812–22). Modern historians, who are not swayed by partisan animosity, acknowledge his merits and the shrewdness of his policy, that benefited British interests and helped to achieve stability in Europe, urgently needed after the Napoleonic turmoil. He strove to keep Russia or Prussia or Austria from gaining the overwhelming domination that Napoleon had earlier won. Partly for this purpose he cooperated with Metternich to limit the power of Russia and Prussia, and joined Talleyrand and Wellington in preventing the ruinous dismemberment of France that her Continental enemies wanted. From the conference at Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) onward, he condemned the efforts of the Quadruple Alliance to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and pointed as precedent to the rebellions in South America. Though in 1821 he conceded Austria’s legal right to quell the revolt at Naples, England under his leadership dissented from the deliberations at Troppau (1820) and Laibach (1821) that sanctioned the principle of repressive intervention. The reader of Don Juan should also remember that Castlereagh tried hard, but failed, to persuade the Congress of Vienna to abolish the slave trade. He was not the blundering scoundrel that Byron excoriated. His suicide in 1822, preceded by acute depression, was caused by overwork and the strain of his many official responsibilities.
12–16 In a sarcastic M manuscript note to Murray, Byron conceded the omission of these stanzas lest they embarrass Murray as a publisher of governmental documents. He asked that the variant couplet of stanza II be then used.
12, 2 Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore As secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1797–1801), Castlereagh forestalled the United Irish rebellion by arresting its leaders and replaced the Irish militia with English troops.
12, 7–8 To lengthen fetters by another fixed / And offer poison long already mixed Since Castlereagh from 1814 to 1821 condoned Austrian control of Italy, his foes accused him of being the crafty Metternich’s dupe and pawn. This charge underrated Castlereagh’s intelligence and objectives.
13, 1 An orator of such set trash of phrase Castlereagh liked to use mixed metaphors and maladroit phrases (‘ignorant impatience of taxation’). See the Preface to Cantos VI–VIII 25–6. In a letter Byron exclaimed, ‘How very odd that you should all be governed by a man who can neither think nor speak English’ (Correspondence II 218). Thomas Moore wrote a parody of Castlereagh’s imagery that amused Byron:
Where (still to use your Lordship’s tropes)
The level of obedience slopes
Upward and downward, as the stream
Of hydra faction kicks the beam!
(The Fudge Family in Paris, Letter II, From Phil Fudge, Esq. To the Lord Viscount Castlereagh, The Poetical Works (1841) VII 100 and note)
13, 6 From that Ixion grindstone’s ceaseless toil ] From that dull Grindstone’s everlasting toil BM
After murdering his father-in-law, Ixion was purified by Zeus. He then repaid this service by courting Hera. For his ingratitude he was chained to a wheel that rolled perpetually in the air of Hades.
14, 5 Conspiracy or congress to be made At Chaumont (March 1814) Austria, Russia, Prussia and England formed the Quadruple or ‘Grand Alliance’. After the downfall of Napoleon, in two Paris treaties and at the long Congress of Vienna (1814–15), this Alliance restored the monarchies in France, Spain and elsewhere and parcelled out large territories in Italy, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Saxony, Poland and Scandinavia without regard to nationalities or the desires of the populace. In so doing Castlereagh and Metternich, abetted by Alexander I of Russia and Frederick William III of Prussia and his ministers, achieved their primary purpose of contriving a balance of power that endured for forty years and that avoided a major European war. At the same time they enthroned some incompetent and cruel men (Ferdinand VII of Spain among others), and the three Continental powers were land-greedy. For instance, Austria absorbed Lombardy and Venetia, while Austrian princes ruled Tuscany, Modena and Parma. Italy was further split when Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies returned to Naples, the King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel I, to Piedmont and Savoy, and the Pope to central Italy. Thus Byron and the liberals loathed the Quadruple Alliance as a diabolical conspiracy against liberty. In CH IV (1817) and Ode on Venice (1818) he deplored the Austrian oppression of Italy, as did Shelley in Lines Written among the Euganean Hills (1818).
15, 4 ]
15, 5 Eutropius of its many masters ‘Eutropius, one of the principal eunuchs of the palace of Constantinople, succeeded the haughty minister whose ruin he had accomplished, and whose vices he soon imitated.… [He] was the first of his artificial sex who dared to assume the character of a Roman magistrate and general [during the reign of Arcadius, Emper
or of the Eastern Empire, 395–408]. Sometimes in the presence of the blushing senate he ascended the tribunal to pronounce judgment or to repeat elaborate harangues… he had been successively sold and purchased by a hundred masters. [Claudian girded at the venality and extortions of Eutropius:] “as he has been sold himself, he is desirous of selling the rest of mankind”’ (Gibbon, II, ch. 32, 1012–14).
16, 4]
Byron’s patriotic Italian acquaintances had expected England in 1814 to help liberate the Italian cities. They therefore felt that Castlereagh betrayed them when Venice was given to Austria and Genoa to the King of Sardinia.
16, 5 Erin’s yet green wounds After the Irish insurrection of 1798 was quelled, the English bribed the Dublin parliament to vote its abolition and union with parliament in London (1800–1801). Though twenty-eight Irish peers were admitted to the House of Lords and 100 Irish members added to the House of Commons, they were vastly outnumbered. Castlereagh, a member of the Irish parliament, was a leader in defeating the rebellion and arranging the union. The Irish therefore regarded him as a traitor, and O’Connell called him the assassin of his country.
17, 3 predicate extol, affirm, preach – an extension of the original meaning of the Latin verb ‘praedicare’ to proclaim.
17, 4 my buff and blue Charles James Fox and the Whig Club of his time adopted a uniform of blue and buff.
17, 6–8 ]
I know not yet – but should be glad to learn –
Mean time inform me what it is you earn?>]
17, 8 my Tory, ultra-Julian ‘I allude not to our friend Landor’s hero, the traitor Count Julian, but to Gibbon’s hero, vulgarly yclept “The Apostate”’ (Byron, 1833). Julian was reared as a Christian, but secretly turned to the Roman gods long before he became emperor in 361. Then he proclaimed his pagan allegiance and also universal toleration and tried to restore pagan worship during his brief reign (died 363) (Gibbon, I, ch. 23, 666–98). Landor’s Count Julian was a Spaniard.