SOURCE: Blackstone, Bernard. “Don Juan.” In Byron: A Survey, pp. 287-347. London: Longman Group, 1975.

[In the following excerpt, Blackstone examines various themes of Don Juan, including femininity and masculinity, sexuality, love, and power.]

‘THE SEXUAL GARMENTS SWEET’

Don Juan is outstanding among English longer poems for the great gallery of women characters which it exhibits; here the only possible comparison is with Shakespeare in his total oeuvre. Each is minutely and sympathetically displayed and discriminated with all the adroitness of a man who (as Byron said in riposte to a Blackwood's accusation of ‘treating women harshly’ in the poem) could honestly affirm: ‘It may be so, but I have been their martyr. My whole life has been sacrificed to them and by them.’ Thus the element of autobiography enters strongly into Byron's presentation: he is remembering his wife as he paints the portrait of Donna Inez, and the Spanish girls of the Pilgrimage form the models for his detailed study of Donna Julia in Canto I, while the Haidée of Cantos II and III draws on his recollections of the Maid of Athens and the mysterious ‘Leila’ of The Giaour. Gulbeyaz and Dudu in Canto VI come straight from his Turkish days, while Aurora and Adeline in the final Canto belong to the years of fame in London.

Yet even here, and from the outset, we are conscious that the poem is proceeding on the two levels of dream and waking. The women characters come from Byron's waking life, but in the poem they are conflated in a somnambulistic phantasmagoria; ‘Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife’, in Blake's phrase. Indeed, Blake's ‘For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise’ (engraved in 1793, with additions in 1818, the year of the writing of Don Juan I and II) forms a remarkably useful ‘Key’ to Byron's poem on its esoteric level. ‘Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice’¹ is what Byron had asked from Annabella; Blake's designs of water, earth, air, all expressing entrapment, and the final design of fire where the liberation of man is achieved only in ‘endless Strife’, exactly convey Byron's situation at this time. Each of the remaining ‘emblems’ could be shown to have its relevance: I will here mention only No. 7, ‘What are these? Alas! the Female Martyr, Is She also the Divine Image?’, No. 8, ‘My Son! my Son!’, No. 10, ‘Help! Help’, and No. 16, ‘I have said to the Worm: Thou art my mother & my sister.’ This last emblem is expanded in the concluding ‘The Keys of the Gates’:

My Eternal Man set in Repose,
The Female from his darkness rose
And She found me beneath a Tree,
A Mandrake, & in her Veil hid me. …
When weary Man enters his Cave
He meets his Saviour in the Grave
Some find a Female Garment there,
And some a Male, woven with care,
Lest the Sexual Garments sweet
Should grow a devouring Winding sheet,
One dies! Alas! the Living & Dead,
One is slain & One is fled. …
Thou'rt my Mother from the Womb,
Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the Tomb,
Weaving to Dreams the Sexual strife
And weeping over the Web of Life.

With almost uncanny relevance, ‘The Gates of Paradise’ epitomises Byron's total life pattern, from the parental conflicts of his birth to the solution ‘in endless Strife’ at Missolonghi; it also focuses the immediate dilemmas of 1816-19, with the mother-wife-sister-daughter agon paramount, as the letters and journals demonstrate.

This same complexity is present, if we look beneath the mocking, ‘realistic’ surface, in the opening stanzas of Don Juan, where Juan's mother, Donna Inez, is a compound of Byron's mother and wife, with some features derived from Lady Caroline Lamb and Claire Clairmont. So too, Donna Julia unites aspects of Teresa, of Augusta, of Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, and of ‘Leila’. Exactly as in a dream, these real-life characters are moulded into strange patterns and flow bewilderingly into one another. These are the ‘Emanations’, as Blake would put it, of the masculine archetype or Zoa who is Juan, himself a split-off piece of the universal man adumbrated in Harold and brought to some kind of completion in Manfred, though the disruptive forces in Byron were from the beginning too powerful to allow a full integration.

In no respect is Don Juan more a reversal of Childe Harold than in its continuous presentation of the social order as a matriarchy. From the beginning Blake's ‘shadowy Female’ dominates the scene, and man, ‘Woman-born and Woman-nourish'd and Woman-educated & Woman-scorn'd’,² is scarcely more than wax in her hands. Seville is forcibly presented as a Garden, a garden ‘of oranges and women’; and it was probably not absent from Byron's mind that theologians have put forward the claim of the orange rather than the apple as the forbidden fruit within the latitude of the Garden of Eden. Be that as it may, we have in the Inez-Julia nexus a curious re-enactment of the Lilith-Eve myth, with Juan-José-Alfonso as the primeval Adam ‘lingering near his garden’ (clxxx) in baffled cavalier-serventism on his women. ‘Other echoes / Inhabit the garden’. Donna Inez is ‘a learned lady’ famed / For every branch of every science known … Her favourite science was the mathematical, … An all-in-all-sufficient self-director, … In short she was a walking calculation' (I, x-xvi): traits more masculine than feminine. Don José, on the other hand, is ‘a mortal of the careless kind … a man / Oft in the wrong, and never on his guard’ (xix-xxi), who is reputed to keep a mistress or two, and thus gives his wife the excuse for an inveterate campaign against him:

… she had a devil of a spirit,
          And sometimes mixed up fancies with realities,
And let few opportunities escape
Of getting her liege lord into a scrape.

(I, xx)

Like Annabella, Donna Inez calls on lawyers and physicians ‘to prove her loving lord was mad’; failing in this, ‘She next decided he was only bad’ (xxvii), and is starting proceedings for divorce when Don José obligingly dies (xxxii).

Juan, the only child of this ill-assorted pair, is very like his father in temperament—spirited, careless, generous, handsome:

At six, I said, he was a charming child,
          At twelve he was a fine, but quiet boy;
Although in infancy a little wild,
          They tamed him down amongst them: to destroy
His natural spirit not in vain they toiled,
          At least it seemed so …

(I, l)

‘They’ are of course the women, who have taken Juan's education in hand after his father's death, and the possé of priests and schoolmasters with which Donna Inez surrounds him. Beside Donna Inez there is also Donna Julia:

Amongst her numerous acquaintance, all
          Selected for discretion and devotion,
There was the Donna Julia, whom to call
          Pretty were but to give a feeble notion
Of many charms in her as natural
          As sweetness to the flower, or salt to Ocean.

(I, lv)

The last line leads us cunningly from the artifice of ‘acquaintance, all / Selected for discretion and devotion’ (Donna Julia's public face) into the dangerous tracts of ‘nature’, the nature of a flower's sweetness and the ocean's salt (very different from the sal Atticum ascribed to Donna Inez in an earlier stanza). Byron is here setting up complexities which are to accompany Juan's progress throughout the poem. Julia's ‘Oriental eye’ bespeaks her Moorish origin:³ at this point Byron links up his experiences at the two ends of the Mediterranean, and fuses in Julia a feminine archetype he is to reduce to its components through the long succession of the poem's heroines. Even Inez is not so monodic as she seems. There is the suggestion (lxvi) that she had sinned with Don Alfonso, Julia's husband, before her friend's marriage. The idea comes unexpectedly, and on the realistic level of the poem's reading is not only implausible but artistically disadvantageous; it is only on the dream level, where characters and motives flow so ambiguously one into the other, that Byron's unconscious and semi-conscious compulsions become apparent. Among these we may count his sense of outrage—

Standing alone beside his desolate hearth,
          Where all his household gods lay shivered round
                    him

(I, xxxvi)

—at what the ‘good’ women have done to him, with the concomitant thirst for revenge (expressed in many letters of this period); and also, and of deeper import, his ‘metaphysical’ motif of the relativity of all human affairs and qualities, which is the basic theme of the poem. Whether Donna Inez—or Mrs Byron, or Annabella—was ever actually unchaste is irrelevant to the inbuilt antitheses of human nature—just as whether a love is ‘pure’ or ‘impure’, selfish or unselfish, Uranian or Pandemic, is irrelevant to its essential guilt. For guilt, original sin, taints all human action and in no department more clearly than the sexual. This is a point I shall return to in discussing the Haidée episode, but it is well to have it in mind here.⁴ ‘What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.’

Juan and Julia fall inevitably in love and the comic-erotic action of the poem is set vigorously in motion. The rest of Canto I is devoted to this pretty piece of adultery. I have no intention of ‘telling the story’ of Don Juan here; the poem which has been called ‘the most readable long poem of the nineteenth century’ deserves to be enjoyed in its plenitude, not in synopsis. On the novelistic level the Juan-Julia intrigue follows what we should expect of a plot based on the old legend already exploited in the medieval play El Atheista Fulminato, in El Burlador de Sevilla y Combidado de Piedra of Gabriel Tellez in the early seventeenth century, in Molière's Don Juan; ou, Le Festin de Pierre, and, of course, in Mozart's opera. But from the very opening of Byron's poem some striking differences become apparent. His Juan is not a gay philanderer or sexual athlete. Far from being the exploiter of feminine weakness, young Juan is the victim of the various women who cross his path.⁵ It is Julia who seduces Juan. Juan's sexual awakening at the age of sixteen, and Julia's growing attraction towards him, her struggles with her own conscience, and final capitulation—all this is drawn with great skill and verve, and the final scene, where Don Alfonso bursts into Julia's bedroom and Juan's presence is ultimately discovered, is richly comic. The undertone of existential irony, however, persists: Juan is not only the victim, but the despised victim, despised particularly by the rough common sense of Julia's maid Antonia. For Antonia, Juan is ‘this pretty gentleman’, ‘the urchin’, and his ‘half-girlish face’ is not worth losing a life or a place for (clxx-clxxi). Juan's first place of concealment is the bed itself, where he lies under Julia and Antonia like a piece of smuggled merchandise:

He had been hid—I don't pretend to say
          How, nor can I indeed describe the where—
Young, slender, and packed easily, he lay,
          No doubt, in little compass, round or square;
But pity him I neither must nor may
          His suffocation by that pretty pair.

(I, clxvi)

This double suffocation, by sense and sensibility, is relevant to the dual stresses to which Juan is exposed in the whole course of the poem: whenever he finds himself in a position to cope adequately with one, he is outflanked by the other. Don Juan is thus, among so many other things, a dramatic enactment of Pascal's and Pope's scenario of man on ‘this isthmus of a middle state’ not simply in so far as he is ‘darkly wise and rudely great’ but also in the sense that the dark wisdom is further obscured by the conflicting claims of passion and judgement.

This initial bedroom scene is a perfect paradigm of Juan's progress from one impasse to another in his futile gestures towards freedom. Juan is bundled from the bed, his first refuge, into the closet, his second.⁶ His position is consistently undignified and, indeed, humiliating. ‘I want a hero …’, so Byron began his poem; if, in reading that first stanza, we have taken ‘want’ in its sense of ‘wish for’, we may now, looking back, accept it rather in the sense of ‘lack’, ‘haven't got’, and realise that this is a lack which Byron has no intention of supplying. In stanzas ii to iv he has given a mock-Miltonic roster of heroic names, with the rider:

                                                                                          I condemn none,
                    But can't find any in the present age
Fit for my poem (that is, for my new one);(7)
So, as I said, I'll take my friend Don Juan.

(I, v)

The nineteenth century is an unheroic age, Byron is saying; let us accept it as that, and in doing so let us ask ourselves whether there have been, after all, any heroic ages? whether the basic condition of man does not debar him from heroism, as it does from beauty, from love and from ultimate significance. The point is Johnson's, in The Vanity of Human Wishes, in The Rambler, and in Rasselas.

Juan's ‘only garment’ is torn off in the scuffle with Alfonso and he flees naked through the night to his mother's house, leaving confusion and disaster behind him. The sequel, over which Byron passes with lightning speed which however does not exclude a dig at British scandalmongering—

The pleasant scandal which arose next day,
          The nine days' wonder which was brought to light,
And how Alfonso sued for a divorce,
Were in the English newspapers, of course.

(I, clxxxviii)

—ends with Julia entering a convent and Juan packed overseas ‘by the advice of some old ladies’ (cxc). The famous letter which Julia writes from her convent cell (a contemporary critic, Colton, found it ‘quite equal, in its way, to the celebrated epistle of Eloisa’) is rich in ambiguities. Among the most quoted lines in Byron are ‘“Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence …”’ (cxciv) and the quotation is usually made with a compassionate sigh for poor woman. In the context of Don Juan such an obsession reveals itself as a vampire threat⁸ to the whole structure of masculine, rational values painstakingly built up through the civilised centuries; it is the amorphous, clinging sexual-familial swamp to which Blake gives the name of ‘storgous’ in the Symbolic Books. ‘“You will proceed in pleasure, and in pride, / Beloved and loving many …”’ Julia goes on, providing exquisite dramatic irony for the reader who is reading Don Juan for the second or twentieth time:

‘My heart is feminine, nor can forget—
          To all, except one image, madly blind.’

(I, cxcvi)

It is this madness, this blindness, which constitutes the vampirish essence of storgè. Eliot's contrasting ‘Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring’ returns us to the ethos of the Turkish Tales.

‘IN TIME'S OCEAN FALLING DROWN'D’

From the cloyingly feminine world of Seville Juan is launched, in Canto II, into the harshly masculine world of the Trinidada, the shipwreck, and the horrors of thirst and cannibalism in an open boat at sea. It is noteworthy that Don Juan progresses by means of these stark horizontal antitheses. We miss the smooth modulations of Childe Harold, which are largely mediated through an architectural imagery of which Don Juan has virtually nothing. This is an unstructured world, amorphous in the grip of forces beyond rational control. The planned contours of the Pilgrimage are replaced by erratic currents. If we read Don Juan, as I think we are bound to do, in what Blake would have called ‘its diabolical sense’, linking up the events of Byron's life, the references of his letters, the threads which stretch backwards and forwards from his other works, to the plot, the characters and the incidental disquisitions of this his latest poem, we cannot but see in it the culmination of that process of fragmentation which I have tried to trace in the Tales and the dramas. The same scurry from the circumference to the centre of the circle of fire is apparent in these two opening cantos of Don Juan. From the circumference—the Garden, and mostly the moonlit garden, of Seville—we retreat to the fiery centre of the longboat becalmed under its subtropic sun. The situation is Ancient Marinerish, but with a farcical dimension unknown to Coleridge. With the byplay about who is to eat whom we return to that ‘theatre of the absurd’ already noted in The Deformed Transformed. Agony and death, like love, have to be deprived of their dignity if ‘reality’ is to be preserved. In terms of our original love-wisdom-power syndrome, we pass in Canto II from the sphere of predatory love to that of predatory power, both absolute non-values undermining the basis of civilised existence.

Existence for Byron, as for Blake—‘Life feeds on life’—is very much a matter of eating and being eaten. When the traditional sanctions of wisdom are removed—and there is no wisdom in Don Juan—we are reduced to the mouth and the vulva.⁹ We know how much Byron objected to seeing his wife eating, and while this may have something to do with his own horror of obesity and recollections of his mother's gormandising, there were probably moments at which Byron saw himself as an homunculus between the steady munch, munch of Annabella's upper and lower jaws.¹⁰ This is Byron eaten: Byron eating is Don Juan in his progress from Seville to Norman Abbey. Seville is ‘famous for oranges and women’, and Juan begins his career there: the rest of the poem is a tuck-shop spree. In reverting to the schoolboy we revert to the Billy Bunter syndrome. It is all cleverly camouflaged (with the usual Byronic loopholes, so that the poet can riposte ‘But I gave you the clue’ if we guess right) but we are not deceived: the promised postal order has failed to arrive, the fatal compensation (financed on borrowed cash from Bob Cherry) is near at hand.¹¹ Don Juan's attitude throughout the poem is that of the compulsive eater, the eternal enemy of the slim, aesthetic Byron.¹² Where Harold had toiled his way along the hard track of the pilgrimage of self-knowledge, the none-too-intelligent Don eats his way through the segments of his orange to its non-existent centre. This explains the impression Don Juan gives us of being a series of segments, in that there is no true progression, no continued development, only a catenation of episodes. We begin with the womb situation, the interior point of the segment, in the Seville Inez-Julia imbroglio. From this we swing violently through the power-eating horrors of the shipwreck with its enforced human contacts to the idyllic solitude of the Aegean island—where we are back again at the centre of our next segment with Haidée and her maid Zoé, back in the love-eating complexities of a private banquet which inevitably latches on to the public complexities of the current Turk-Greek power-eating situation—and off we go again with Juan to the new horrors of the Seraglio and of Ismail!

Juan and Julia, Juan and Haidée, are love-eaters: but Byron is concerned to show us, within the diagrams of the poem, that without wisdom love cannot be separated from the corruptions of power (or powerlessness). Remember that within his own private diagram Byron had sought to attain that wisdom, first through his immersion in the Islamic East, and second in his attachment to the ‘wise woman’ Annabella. He knew that a simple withdrawal to ‘solitude’, the island dream, solves nothing for a man of his kind, or for any man of energy and intelligence: you become a vegetable or break out into violence, Blake's ‘endless strife’. The succumbing to the Venetian love dream was a springboard for the Missolonghian catastrophe. Even physiologically, the damages inflicted by Byron on his constitution in those years, the syphilitic self-eating, the sword outwearing its sheath, determined the fatal outcome of his fever. Without wisdom, the tertium quid, all the magnificence of ‘sincerity and strength’ which Swinburne divined in Byron availed him nothing: and of course this he had realised from the beginning. It is the whole point of the ‘pilgrimage’ of Childe Harold. The Greek adventure of 1823 was to be Byron's last cast for self-synthesis: ‘the release from action and suffering, release from the inner / And the outer compulsion’.

Meanwhile, the Greek adventure of Don Juan is a further penetration into the sensual whirlpool. A tautened, cadaverous Juan (otherwise strangely unaffected by the horrors he has gone through) is washed up on the shores of an island in the Cyclades. Have we finished with Julia? Apparently: but remember her letter, ‘Its seal a sun-flower: “Elle vous suit partout”’ (cxcviii). He may escape from the embraces of the sea, but never from ‘the ocean Woman’. (‘Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis / Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray / Clutch and cling?’) The sea enters Don Juan with Canto II and remains an important protagonist up to the end of Canto VI. A major element in Childe Harold II and IV and the Turkish Tales, it is largely absent from the dramas and the Italian poems. As the creative-devouring symbol of the eternal feminine, its presence in the first half of Don Juan is highly significant in establishing the work's main coordinates. In swinging from the garden of Seville into the ‘murderous innocence of the sea’ we pass from the theme of eating to that of being eaten, from dream into nightmare. The role of the sea as grim mother, with Juan ‘rocked in the cradle of the deep’ to a sleep without waking, is emphasised in the storm's lullaby—

          The high wind made the treble, and as bass
The hoarse harsh waves kept time …

(II, xxxiv)

and the succeeding calm which

Lulled them like turtles sleeping on the blue
          Of Ocean …

(II, lxviii)

(destined to be eaten, if caught). Juan's tutor, Pedrillo, is quietly bled to death, and the surgeon drinks ‘from the fast-flowing veins’, a vampire touch which is to be curiously paralleled in Haidée's maternal tending of Juan. When at last they approach land,

Famine—despair—cold—thirst and heat, had done
          Their work on them by turns, and thinned them to
Such things a mother had not known her son
          Amidst the skeletons of that gaunt crew.

(II, cii)

The shore is rocky, and its dangers unknown, but

Lovely seemed any object that should sweep
Away the vast—salt—dread—eternal Deep.

(II, ciii)

In their haste to get on shore, the four remaining occupants of the long-boat overset her, and only Juan, a skilled swimmer, survives:

          He buoyed his boyish limbs, and strove to ply
With the quick wave

(II, cvi)

and with the aid of an oar, that ‘piece of wood of small value’ which here plays the part of the Ark,¹³ succeeds in reaching the shore.

There, breathless, with his digging nails he clung
          Fast to the sand, lest the returning wave,
From whose reluctant roar his life he wrung,
          Should suck him back to her insatiate grave:
And there he lay, full length, where he was flung.
          Before the entrance of a cliff-worn cave,
With just enough of life to feel its pain,
And deem that it was saved, perhaps, in vain.

(II, cviii)

And there, in front of the cave, he loses consciousness.

‘WEAVING TO DREAMS THE SEXUAL STRIFE’

The situation is close to that of The Tempest. The Christian atmosphere, modulating guilt, prayer and forgiveness, of Shakespeare's final masterpiece has been often noted: it is here too in Don Juan, but with unShakespearean undertones of irony. Juan, who is Everyman, is also the crucified Christ. The transition from Old Testament imagery—the Ark, the dove, the rainbow—to New Testament is subtly made through a pair of Pietà-like images: the first, while Juan is still in the embrace of the grim mother, has been already noted (cii): ‘the skeletons of that gaunt crew’ brings Michelangelo's Christ irresistibly to mind. This design is now reproduced at the entrance of the cave. When Juan recovers consciousness, he sees ‘A lovely female face of seventeen’:

'Twas bending close o'er his, and the small mouth
          Seemed almost prying into his for breath.

(II, cxiii)

Haidée—‘the maid, or whatsoe'er / She was’—feeds him, watching him ‘like a mother’ (clviii). In his sleep he lies ‘Hushed as the babe upon its mother's breast’ (cxlviii); the next stanza brings in a reference to ‘the sweet portraits of the Virgin Mary’, and a much later stanza culminates the irony with an adaptation from Sappho:

Oh, Hesperus! thou bringest all good things—
          Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
          The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer;
Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
          Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;
Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast.

(III, cvii)

Throughout the Haidée idyll Juan is consistently presented as a child. In swimming to shore, ‘he buoyed his boyish limbs’; in the cave he ‘slept like a top’ (a childhood phrase), ‘like an infant’ (cvi, cxxxiv, cxliii): there is, in short, a return to boyhood for Juan, what I have called a regression to the central point of the fruit's segment. Haidée too is presented as very young but there is in her the mysterious essence of feminine wisdom which is, in one of its aspects, guile, and in the deepest recesses of its being, storgè, a force ‘madly blind’.

As I have suggested in an earlier discussion of the Haidée episode, the love of Juan and Haidée is both innocent and guilty. It is innocent in its naturalness, its self-giving; but it is guilty in that it partakes of the primal guilt, the original sin, the Fall. Byron and Blake stand out amongst the Romantics in their profound conviction of this primal flaw in the nature of man: it is a ‘pessimism’ which contributed to Byron's downgrading by the optimistic Victorians, but as decade after decade of our twentieth century passes it becomes increasingly plausible that somehow, somewhere, something went wrong in the existential drama. A false step was taken, a wrong corner turned. This is no place for theological discussion, and it matters little along which lines we care to interpret the great myth of the Fall—it need by no means be along Judaeo-Christian lines—but what does matter for our understanding of Byron is our recognition of the central place of this doctrine in his thinking. His letters and journals are full of it, and so is his verse. Long before Kafka Byron sees life as a trial, a lawsuit in which it is irrelevant whether the defendant knows or does not know what he is accused of: he is guilty by virtue of existing.

Blake's ‘For the Sexes: the Gates of Paradise’ may well continue to be our ‘key’ to the Haidée episode of Don Juan. Here indeed we have the sleeping ‘universal man’ in his cave, ‘Weaving to dreams the sexual strife’. Dragging Juan into her cave, Haidée ‘rescues’ him as Julia had ‘protected’ him in the depths of her bed and the straitjacket of her ‘closet’. The Haidée episode abounds in cave scenes, curiously linked to dreams and nightmares. The sea beats and washes around the caves, which are at once natural and nonnatural, a Fall architecture of a ruined world:

And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand,
          Over the shining pebbles and the shells,
Gliding along the smooth and hardened sand,
          And in the worn and wild receptacles
Worked by the storms, yet worked as it were planned
          In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells,
They turned to rest; and, each clasped by an arm,
Yielded to the deep Twilight's purple charm.

(II, clxxxiv)

Here, Byron's Aegean experiences of 1809-11 and his pitying sense of human destiny and the fragility of human happiness are combined. It is in the close weaving of such a wealth of apparently disparate material and tones that Byron achieves a density of utterance surpassing that of any of his contemporaries, with the exception of Blake.

The Haidée dream begins when Juan wakes out of the exposure of his shipwreck nightmare into the cosy protection of ‘the lady of the cave’. He is her ‘sea-treasure’, her ‘ocean-wreck’. The phrases carry a number of suggestions which I have discussed in that earlier essay: to those I will here add a new one, that of smuggling and ‘wrecking’. Juan is salvage; is he also perhaps the fated victim of the kind of moth-to-candle attraction, which the Cornish seaboard villagers exercised with lamp and beacon to draw the storm-tost ships on to their murderous coasts?¹⁴ In this reading, the witch or vampire aspect of Haidée—‘the maid, or whatsoe'er she was … the small mouth … her eyes / Were black as death’,

Forth from its raven fringe the full glance flies,
          Ne'er with such force the swiftest arrow flew;
'Tis as the snake late coiled, who pours his length,
And hurls at once his venom and his strength(15)

(II, cxiii-cxvii)

takes on an added dimension of menace, as though the beacon guilt-innocence in Haidée has called to the corresponding innocence-guilt of Juan across the waste of waters. Certainly Juan is stowed in the cave as contraband.

The coastguard turns up in the shape of Haidée's ‘piratical papa’, Lambro. The name means ‘shining’, and his coming throws a fierce light on the whole dream situation. Ironically he is himself a smuggler and slave-dealer, plying among the islands for merchandise to sell to the Turks. This is a Byronic existential complication: he arrives on the scene just as the family poet, himself ‘a sad trimmer’,¹⁶ sings the famous ‘Isles of Greece’ song. We are in a world not of make-believe but of hedgings, of provisional commitments and rhetorical declarations in which a love so childlike as that of Juan and Haidée has no chance to survive. Their world is a dream world precisely because it is the natural world. In the realm of artifice which has been man's habitat since the Fall, there is no room for simple passion or childlike trust.

They should have lived together deep in woods,
          Unseen as sings the nightingale; they were
Unfit to mix in these thick solitudes
          Called social, haunts of Hate, and Vice, and Care;
How lonely every freeborn creature broods!
          The sweetest song-birds nestle in a pair;
The eagle soars alone; the gull and crow
Flock o'er their carrion, just like men below.

(IV, xxviii)

The natural is the abnormal. ‘Here is a place of disaffection / Time before and time after / In a dim light. …’ In human society, only the artificial can survive. Lambro is a curious blend of the natural and the artificial. Byron describes him as ‘an old man, who lived upon the water’—an Old Man of the Sea, then—at a very early point in the episode (II, cxxiv). With subtle touches here and there Byron prepares us for his coming over three Cantos—he is ‘a fisher … of men, / Like Peter the Apostle’ (II, cxxvi), Haidée's ‘piratical papa, … a sea-attorney … the best of fathers … the good old gentleman’ (III, xiii-xv), and finally ‘a dark eye … fixed upon the pair’ as Haidée and Juan wake from their last sleep together (IV, xxxv). A remarkable conflation of archetypes is achieved here: the fisher-king, Ulysses, God the Father: an adult, male intrusion into the female-orientated, childhood world of the lovers.

Juan and Haidée wake up to that remorseless eye from a sleep in which Haidée has a nightmare. The irony of the ‘Oh, Hesperus!’ stanza lies in its immediately preceding this nightmare and the living nightmare of the homecoming of Lambro. Haidée's dream reaches out into the past, into Juan's shipwreck, his near-death, and the cave scene which followed it, and into the future, into the homecoming of her piratical papa. A good deal of Byron's own 1813 nightmares seemed mixed up in it too. ‘I awoke from a dream!—well! and have not others dreamed?’, he had written in his Journal on 23 November, ‘—Such a dream!—but she did not overtake me. I wish the dead would rest, however. Ugh! how my blood chilled,—and I could not wake. … I do not like this dream.’ Haidée's nightmare runs:

She dreamed of being alone on the sea-shore,
          Chained to a rock; she knew not how, but stir
She could not from the spot, and the loud roar
          Grew, and each wave rose roughly, threatening her;
And o'er her upper lip they seemed to pour,
          Until she sobbed for breath, and soon they were
Foaming o'er her lone head, so fierce and high—
Each broke to drown her, yet she could not die.

(IV, xxxi)

This is dream identification: Haidée enacts her lover's ordeal as he struggled for life before she reached him.

Anon—she was released, and then she strayed
          O'er the sharp shingles with her bleeding feet,
And stumbled almost every step she made;
          And something rolled before her in a sheet,
Which she must still pursue howe'er afraid:
          'Twas white and indistinct, nor stopped to meet
Her glance nor grasp, for still she gazed and grasped,
And ran, but it escaped her as she clasped.

(IV, xxxii)

Here we have a mixture of Byron's 1813 dream with an inversion of the blissful ‘wandering forth … Over the shining pebbles and the shells’ quoted on p. 305 above. One suspects that Byron has been deeply involved in some real life situation which provides the imagery here. The ‘something rolled before her in a sheet’ seems to present the 1813 ‘she did not overtake me’ in nightmare reverse: the shudder is worthy of M. R. James, as the final lines of the episode, ‘the sea dirges low / Rang in her sad ears like a mermaid's song’ bring to mind T. S. Eliot's waking to reality by human voices from the chambers of the sea.

‘ONE DIES! ALAS! THE LIVING AND DEAD!’

The harsh masculine world which Lambro brings into the epicene fantasy of the first six cantos of Don Juan gradually gains the ascendancy as we move away from the sea to the warlike foci of Central Europe and the frozen banks of the Volga. In terms of this present study, it is a matter of the final, or almost final, triumph of power over both wisdom and love. This would not be so disastrous for Byron as a writer if he could have gathered the theme of power to himself, if he were celebrating some exercise of his own power, or of some force with which he could identify himself. But it is, alas! nothing but naked, irrational power. Naked, irrational love, in the first four cantos, had been a difficult theme enough, though Byron manages it with aplomb; but it has its deep creative as well as its deep destructive sides. Naked power is nothing but destructive, and the time has long gone by when Byron could idealise Napoleon or Caesar. His letters and journals show his disillusion growing towards the end of 1819—about love, politics, Europe itself (‘an outworn portion of the globe’) and he even contemplates emigrating to South America. As usual, he is fighting on a number of fronts: with Murray and his ‘committee’ for the non-gelding of Don Juan (‘Don Juan shall be an entire horse, or none’, letter of 19 January to Hobhouse and Kinnaird), with Count Guiccioli for the possession of Teresa (letter of 26 July to Augusta), with Teresa for the possession of his spiritual independence (letter of 23 August to Hobhouse, quoted above, p. 290), with Augusta for her continued affection, in one of the most passionate of his letters (17 May):

They say absence destroys weak passions—and confirms strong ones—Alas! mine for you is the union of all passions and of all affections—Has strengthened itself but will destroy me—I do not speak of physical destruction—for I have endured and can endure much—but of the annihilation of all thoughts, feelings or hopes.

Yet in the midst of this despondency he can defend the antitheses of Don Juan with all his old verve and wicked wit:

… I will answer your friend C[ohen], who objects to the quick succession of fun and gravity, as if in that case the gravity did not (in intention, at least) heighten the fun. His metaphor is, that ‘we are never scorched and drenched at the same time’. Blessings on his experience! Ask him these questions about ‘scorching and drenching’. Did he never play at Cricket, or walk a mile in hot weather? Did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handling the cup to his charmer, to the great shame of his nankeen breeches? Did he never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on his head, which all the foam of Ocean could not cool? Did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water, damning his eyes and his valet's? Did he never inject for a Gonorrhea? or make water through an ulcerated Urethra? Was he ever in a Turkish bath, that marble paradise of sherbet and Sodomy? Was he ever in a cauldron of boiling oil, like St John, or in the sulphureous waves of hell … ?

(Letter of 12 August to Murray.)

There is, finally, the fight for Italian freedom with which he is trying to identify himself by supporting the Carbonari (a power struggle, then, with which he can feel himself in sympathy, though he has no personal ambitions) but here again he is badly let down by the conspirators' apathy or timidity.

The transition from the sensuous-sentimental reaches of Haidée's island to the horrific power struggle of the siege of Ismail is brilliantly managed. The idyll begins and ends with a feast—the fried eggs, fruit and honey of the initial cave scene, and the ‘pilaus and meats of all sorts … and flasks of Samian and of Chian wine’ of the quasinuptial banquet in Lambro's mansion. The theme is Homeric, and this final scene of joy is suffused with an Homeric gusto. But food implies killing, life is consequent on death, Haidée has dared to bring Juan out of his cave into her home because of a report that her father is dead. But Lambro is very much alive, and in the house, though his presence is unmarked. Death, that ‘gaunt Gourmand’ (XV, ix), is about to resume his sport with Juan. But first he and Haidée are allowed to sleep, in unsuspecting happiness, when the banquet is over and the guests have departed. It is in this sleep that Haidée has her nightmare, and from it that she and Juan wake up to the confrontation with her father.

The scene of somnolent, luxurious delight immediately explodes into violence. Juan resists, and is wounded and overcome by twenty of Lambro's men. Haidée suffers a cerebral haemorrhage, and dies within a fortnight. That she is with child (IV, lxx) is not merely an added touch of pathos, but a corollary of the Fall syndrome; the child ‘might / Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin’ (or, as the MS reading runs, ‘a child of beauty, though of sin’, which I think is nearer to Byron's thought) but Destiny forbids. Meanwhile Juan resumes his career as human merchandise. Lambro's sailors rush him down to shore immediately after the fight, ‘and under hatches, / They stowed him, with strict order to the watches’ (IV, 1). Note how his progress is relentlessly from trap to trap: Bed, closet, boat, cave, mansion, ship, slave-market, Seraglio, bed again. The journey to Constantinople is richly comic. Juan, now a slave, gazes out from the ship on ‘the shores of Ilion’ where the mounds still marking ‘many a hero's grave’ meet his eye. (The irony requires no emphasis.) His fellow-slaves are a troupe of Italian opera singers, sold to Lambro by their own impresario while en route to an engagement in Sicily. Byron here draws on his Italian experiences as in his description of the Troad he draws upon his old Levantine pilgrimage. With jokes about castrati, prima donnas, pretty lads bursting with conceit, and the buffo Raucocanti's boundless egotism, even in chains, the point of impotence is pressed home. As they approach the Sublime Porte, Raucocanti is chained to his most hated rival, the tenor, and Juan is fettered to ‘a Bacchante blooming visage’, a foretaste of the enforced amours of his next avatar.

The stanzas on fame which are intercalated into the narrative at this point (IV, xcvii-cxii) bring the theme of power home to Byron in a personal sense. The discussion is goodhumoured, ranging through Byron's ample gamut of tones, first mocking:

                                                                      the publisher declares, in sooth,
Through needles' eyes it easier for the camel is
To pass, than these two cantos into families

(IV, xcvii)

—then knuckle-rapping:

[I] recollect the time when all this cant
Would have provoked remarks—which now it shan't

(IV, xcviii)

—then pathetic:

          Whether my verse's fame be doomed to cease,
While the right hand which wrote it still is able,
          Or of some centuries to take a lease;
The grass upon my grave will grow as long,
And sigh to midnight winds, but not to song

(IV, xcix)

—then judicial:

And so great names are nothing more than nominal,
          And love of Glory's but an airy lust,
Too often in its fury overcoming all
          Who would as 't were identify their dust
From out the wide destruction, which, entombing all,
          Leaves nothing till ‘the coming of the just’—
Save change: I've stood upon Achilles' tomb,
And heard Troy doubted; Time will doubt of Rome

(IV, ci)

—then scabrously realistic, in its picture of the monument to De Foix:

A broken pillar, not uncouthly hewn,
          But which Neglect is hastening to destroy,
Records Ravenna's carnage on its face,
While weeds and ordure rankle round the base

(IV, ciii)

—with a return to the personal in what is the most powerful apologia Byron ever made for his life and art:

If in the course of such a life as was
                    At once adventurous and contemplative,
Men who partake all passions as they pass,
          Acquire the deep and bitter power to give
Their images again as in a glass,
          And in such colours that they seem to live;
You may do right forbidding them to show 'em,
But spoil (I think) a very pretty poem.

(IV, cvii)

The theme of the first Act of Don Juan is eating and being eaten; that of the second is buying and selling.¹⁷ Exposed for sale in the Istanbul slave-market, Juan finds himself at the side of an Englishman, a soldier of fortune named Johnson,

          A man of thirty, rather stout and hale,
With resolution in his dark grey eye,

(V, x)

who treats Juan, as they wait to be bought, to an instructive discourse. He commiserates Juan's sorrow at the loss of Haidée and freedom, but reminds him subtly that his love for Haidée was itself a species of slavery, among the many which life brings.

‘Love's the first net which spreads its deadly mesh;
          Ambition, Avarice, Vengeance, Glory, glue
The glittering lime-twigs of our latter days,
Where still we flutter on for pence or praise.’

(V, xxii)

‘For pence or praise’ effects a modulation from the trap motif to that of purchase; but Byron is not content to leave the transition there, he brings in the theme of eating as well. The merchant, who has sold Juan and Johnson to the black eunuch, goes home to dine. ‘I wonder if his appetite was good?’, Byron muses: does conscience ever ask him the ‘curious sort of question … how far we should / Sell flesh and blood’ (V, xxx).

I think with Alexander, that the act
          Of eating, with another act or two,
Makes us feel our mortality in fact
          Redoubled …

(V, xxxii)

What John Johnson, a ‘rough moralist’ like his great namesake (whom Byron so much admired), is in fact suggesting, is a connection of Juan's pleasant life of love and feasting on Haidée's island with its origins in Lambro's slave dealing: and, beyond this, with the mercantile laws which govern all human intercourse:

          'Tis pleasant purchasing our fellow-creatures;
And all are to be sold, if you consider
          Their passions, and are dext'rous; some by features
Are bought up, others by a warlike leader,
          Some by a place—as tend their years or natures:
The most by ready cash—but all have prices,
From crowns to kicks, according to their vices.

(V, xxvii)

The stanza sums up the buying-selling episodes of the succeeding action: the Sultana, herself a buyer, is nevertheless bought by Juan's ‘features’, while Juan is later bought by the leaders Lascy and Souvaroff, and by the ‘place’ offered him in exchange for his sexual services by the Empress Catherine.

Thus the Seraglio episode, coming as it does at the exact centre of the poem as we have it, forms a species of knot or vortex into which all the themes of the poem, past and future, are tightly woven. Byron likes this recapitulation technique: he employs it again in the Norman Abbey sequences at the end of the poem.¹⁸ The palace is a labyrinthine combination of all the earlier and later traps, a concatenation of caverns, corridors, closets, beds, fortresses, prisons; it can even be seen as a slave-ship, riding high over the Golden Horn; hemmed in by its cypresses, it is also a tomb. The first thing Juan senses is its inhumanity, its deathlike solitude. We remember that the claustrophobic Venetian plays are being written pari passu with Cantos IV, V and VI. The ‘strange firefly’ caught in the ‘enormous spider's net’ in The Two Foscari might stand for Juan entangled in the Seraglio love-power complexities. He is here, emphatically, the love-victim; his very masculinity is threatened when the eunuch Baba dresses him in female garments and menaces him with castration (V, lxxv). The Seraglio is a Lesbian world, in which Juan's hermaphroditism offers a mild titillation to Gulbeyaz' sexual palate. The ‘gigantic portal’ guarding her chamber is the sexual organ itself, drawing him in as spilt spermatozoon, a dribble from the rent island intercourse: individuality is lost in the ‘devouring winding sheet’ of ‘the Sexual Garments’.

Some find a Female Garment there,
And some a Male, woven with care.

The sexual strife reaches its climax in the ‘address to the throne’ stanzas of Canto IX, the apotheosis of the vulva: a comic extrapolation which I leave for later scrutiny in a survey of the total ‘love’ theme in Don Juan.

.....

‘A DEVOURING WINDING SHEET’

Love narrows drastically to sex in the later reaches of Don Juan.¹⁹ And it is cold, calculated sex, orientated towards petty motifs of power and status, disguising itself under the various masks of sensibility, prudence, idealism and benevolence. The unbridled sexual voracity of Catherine holds a certain savage grandeur; but the English cantos introduce us to a shadow world of shifts and subterfuges. The Duchess of Fitz-Fulke is the nearest we come in Cantos XIII-XVII to Catherine's exuberance and amorality: but even she is driven to disguise in her approach to the seduction of Juan; and that the disguise should be a religious one has its relevance. Lady Adeline's interest in Juan is disguised even from herself. Aurora Raby's role is dubious: the poem breaks off just as we are getting interested. She is presented as a point of crystalline purity and integrity within the swirling currents of intrigue and compromise which knit the texture of these concluding Cantos: but she may be more complex than she appears at first sight. She belongs to ‘that High World’ of selfless devotion which Byron had evoked in Hebrew Melodies:

The worlds beyond this World's perplexing waste
          Had more of her existence, for in her
There was a depth of feeling to embrace
Thoughts, boundless, deep, but silent too as Space.

(XVI, xlviii)

But is there not a touch in that ‘silent too as Space’ of the icy solitudes of ‘When Coldness wraps this suffering clay’? Byron, and, perhaps we are meant to assume, subconsciously Juan also, compares Aurora with Haidée:

… each was radiant in her proper sphere:
          The island girl, bred up by the lone sea,
More warm, as lovely, and not less sincere,
          Was Nature's all: Aurora could not be,
Nor would be thus:—the difference in them
Was such as lies between a flower and gem

(XV, lviii)

—a comparison which tells us all we need to know.

The sea which washed Haidée's island is absent from the inland wastes of the last four Cantos. Yet not entirely so. By a subtle stroke of his incorrigibly analogising imagination, Byron restores the sea in its feminine aspect through an identification of this world of women, this ‘gynocracy’ (XII, lxvi; XVI, lii), with the prolific/voracious, superficially entrancing/potentially destructive powers of the ocean. It is worth following the development of this image through the later Cantos. The theme, dropped since the Seraglio episode, reappears in the Catherine imbroglio:

What a strange thing is Man! and what a stranger
          Is Woman! What a whirlwind is her head,
And what a whirlpool full of depth and danger
          Is all the rest about her!

(IX, lxiv)

and is boldly amplified in the London cantos. English women may be rather cold, ‘But after all they are a North-West Passage / Unto the glowing India of the soul’, and (Byron adds ironically) ‘young beginners may as well commence / With quiet cruising o'er the ocean woman’ (XIII, xxxix-xl).

‘Perched on a promontory’ (XV, xix) overlooking ‘the ocean, Woman’, Byron, now a mere spectator (XIII, vii), takes stock of its gulfs and shallows. ‘There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer's sea’ (the latest projection of Annabella), who seems harmless enough, but caveat nauta! (XV, xli). Aurora Raby has more in common with the depths of space than those of the sea; nevertheless, her complexion is described as ‘always clear, / As deep seas in a sunny atmosphere’ (XVI, xciv). Adeline is concerned with her ‘lord's, son's, or similar connection's / Safe conduct through the rocks of re-elections’ (xcv).

About all these women there is a certain ambiguity: ‘they are like virtuous mermaids, whose / Beginnings are fair faces, ends mere fishes’ (XII, lxxiii). Women are the ocean, express thalassic powers as mermaids and fishes, and carry the ocean about with them in their wombs. This is a striking anticipation of the thesis of Ferenzci's book Thalassa, which sees man's sexual urge as the desire to regress, individually, to the womb and, racially, the sea: to abandon the agonising evolutionary struggle and return to the preconscious and prehuman.

A plausible exegesis of Byron's work could be made along these lines: it would conclude with a ‘thalassic’ interpretation of The Island, Byron's final and major womb poem.²⁰ Already, in the later Don Juan, we are afforded fascinating glimpses of the way his mind is moving. Beneath the factitious rationality of English ‘high life’, its social and political decorum (to which I shall turn shortly), the deep sexual tides are determining the distribution of the visible shoals and sandbanks. Lord Henry holds forth, boringly, by day; Fitz-Fulke glides from darkened chamber to chamber, excitingly, by night. In search of her mystery Juan, prompted by ‘the rippling sound of the lake's billow’ beneath his ‘Gothic chamber’ (XVI, xv), traverses Lara's long gallery where ‘voices from the urn / Appear to wake’ (xviii) and his memory reverts to a former idyll:

And the pale smile of Beauties in the grave,
          The charms of other days, in starlight gleams,
Glimmer on high; their buried locks still wave
          Along the canvas; their eyes glance like dreams
On ours, or spars within some dusky cave,
          But Death is imaged in their shadowy beams.

(XVI, xix)

‘The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph / Are figured in the drift of stars / Ascend to summer in the tree.’ Death: sea: cave—the syndrome persists. But what is Fitz-Fulke, the ambulant mystery? Precisely that complex of life and death, of amniotic sea and emergent individuality which is the womb. ‘Voices from the urn’ sound in Juan's ears, another pregnant ambiguity. They proclaim, but they also invite, entice back to the cave—death, the womb-life. Fitz-Fulke blatantly, but also Adeline and Haidée and Aurora in different gradations of subtlety, are moving wombs, living organisms built around the voracious matrix. The theme is first sounded in its starkness in the amusing address to the vulva in Canto IX which Byron composes as a fantasia above the ground-bass of Horace's ‘O tu teterrima causa’:²¹

O thou ‘teterrima causa’ of all ‘belli’—
          Thou gate of Life and Death—thou nondescript!
Whence is our exit and our entrance,—well I
          May pause in pondering how all souls are dipped
In thy perennial fountain:—how man fell, I
          Know not, since Knowledge saw her branches
                    stripped
Of her first fruit; but how he falls and rises
Since,—thou hast settled beyond all surmises.
Some call thee ‘the worst cause of War,’ but I
          Maintain thou art the best: for after all
From thee we come, to thee we go, and why
          To get at thee not batter down a wall,
Or waste a World? since no one can deny
          Thou dost replenish worlds both great and small:
With—or without thee—all things at a stand
Are, or would be, thou sea of Life's dry land!

(IX, lv-lvi)

The naughtiness of the play on ‘stand’ and ‘fall’ should not divert us from the serious Fall theme which, running as it does through the whole of Don Juan, is here narrowed to a specifically sexual context which will persist through the remaining Cantos with little relief from Nature's benisons or even from man's inhumanity to man. ‘Elle vous suit partout.’ Julia's ominous ‘elle’ has now caught up with Juan, and her plaintive

‘Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
          'Tis Woman's whole existence; Man may range …’

(I, cxciv)

is seen for what it is, a piece of devastating irony. Man may range; but not very far. For wherever he ranges, it is within ‘the gynocracy’. Whether he ‘stands’ or ‘falls’, it is within the ambience of the ‘perennial fountain’ which is also the universal grave. The ambiguities here remind me forcibly of the ‘Lines Inscribed upon a Cup formed from a Skull’²² and the analogous stanzas of Childe Harold II. Compare the use of ‘wall’ and ‘waste’ there with the conceits here: wall as the ramparts of Troy and hymen, ‘waste a world’ as the destruction of Troy and the death of millions of spermatozoa. ‘Life’ is a dry land, a Waste Land: we plunge into ‘the ocean woman’ as a refuge from life, from its dry and dusty duties, its exhausting claims upon us.²³ ‘Die’ is a seventeenth-century euphemism for the sexual act: and this is one of the great ‘metaphysical’ moments of Don Juan. It is the ‘low dream’ and the low world of sexual fulfilment asserted against the ‘high dream’ and the ‘High World’ of total realisation; beneath the brilliantly funny phrasing we detect the bitterness of defeat.

In addressing the organ Byron severs it from the woman and thus from its total human context. At this point the poem's swing over from ‘love’ to ‘sex’ is effected. The apostrophe ushers in the Empress Catherine episode (IX, lvii-X, xlviii) where Juan first knows commercial sex: commercial in the sense that beside being bought he is himself a buyer. Catherine is ‘the grand epitome / Of that great cause of war’. She swallows lovers as she swallows kingdoms. Juan ‘loves’ her through ‘self-love’ (IX, lxviii); Catherine ‘loves’ him with ‘temporary passion’ (lxx). The sea image re-enters the narrative in the ignoble guise of refrigerator: Juan is ‘of that delighted age’ when all women are equally attractive, that is, reduce themselves to pure vulva:

We don't much care with whom we may engage,
          As bold as Daniel in the lions' den,
So that we can our native sun assuage
          In the next ocean, which may flow just then—
To make a twilight in, just as Sol's heat is
Quenched in the lap of the salt sea, or Thetis.

(IX, lxix)

At least four of Byron's major sanctities are desecrated here: sun, sea, Scripture, twilight.²⁴ We proceed (in stanzas lxxiii-lxxvi) to an excursus on love which for the first time in the poem stresses the absurdity of the act, that ‘trivial and vulgar way of coition’ whose folly had impressed, among others, Sir Thomas Browne. The love-illusion itself is charming; but how uncharming the sequel.

How beautiful that moment! and how odd is
          That fever which precedes the languid rout
Of our sensations! What a curious way
The whole thing is of clothing souls in clay!

(IX, lxxv)

Byron had gone into ‘the whole thing’ in more detail in Cain (II, i, 48-60):

CAIN.
I should be proud of thought
Which knew such things [as the secrets of the universe].
LUCIFER.
                                                                                But if that high thought were
Link'd to a servile mass of matter, and,
Knowing such things, aspiring to such things,
And science still beyond them, were chain'd down
To the most gross and petty paltry wants,
All foul and fulsome, and the very best
Of thine enjoyments a sweet degradation,
A most enervating and filthy cheat
To lure thee on to the renewal of
Fresh souls and bodies, all foredoom'd to be
As frail, and few so happy …

The spirit/clay paradox lies behind a good deal of Byron's thinking, and in its sexual application can be traced as far back as the 1813 journal:

It seems strange; a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one's self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting.

(13 December 1813)

Part of the moral purpose of Don Juan was to name these ideas, to strip the veil from the face of horrid reality. And this, Byron told Murray, was what Teresa objected to when she begged him not to go on with Don Juan. ‘The truth is that it is TOO TRUE, and the women hate every thing which strips off the tinsel of Sentiment; and they are right, as it would rob them of their weapons’ (Letter of 12 October 1820).

Despite Teresa's protests, and a promise to discontinue Don Juan which he was not able to keep,²⁵ Byron proceeded to strip off more of the tinsel of sentiment. Juan's situation in Catherine's court reproduces Juan's in Haidée's cave, but in a cynical key. The successive exhaustions (X, xl) of shipwreck and love-affair are now repeated in the guise of warfare and ‘royalty's vast arms’ (xxxvii). ‘The trilling wire in the blood / Sings below inveterate scars / Appeasing long forgotten wars.’ There is an echo from even further back in the story: Julia's sentimental letter is paralleled by a letter Juan now receives from his mother, replete with hypocrisy (a deity which Juan apostrophises in stanza xxxiv) and the recommendation of dissimulation (xxxii). Donna Inez has remarried (sex has had its way with her too) and there is a new little boy to be brought up along the educational lines which have proved so effective with Juan. By a masterly stroke, Inez praises ‘the empress's maternal love’, which is not very different in voracity, Byron implies by his underlining, from his mother's ‘storgous appetite’.

A survey of the sustained apostrophes which punctuate the course of Don Juan is a revealing exercise.²⁶ They are all addressed to love, and strike the keynotes of the successive episodes. Irony runs through them, and is steadily amplified up to the final ‘O thou “teterrima causa” … !’ The series begins with a quotation from Campbell:

‘Oh Love! in such a wilderness as this,
          Where Transport and Security entwine,
Here is the Empire of thy perfect bliss,
          And here thou art a God indeed divine.’
The bard I quote from does not sing amiss …

(I, lxxxviii)

The fact that he is quoting, and that he proceeds to comment on the value of the quotation, constitutes the initial irony. This is love in excelsis, as it were, on which Byron feels himself unworthy to expatiate. Next comes love Platonic, in stanza I, cxvi: ‘Oh Plato! Plato! you have paved the way, / With your confounded fantasies. …’ The tone is rueful, slightly exasperated. In ‘No more—no more, Oh! never more, my heart, / Canst thou be my sole world, my universe!’ (I, ccxv) the two previous invocations are given a personal turn. This broadens to the historical in ‘Oh, Love! of whom great Caesar was the suitor …’ (II, ccv) and contemplates love as power and even wisdom: ‘Thou mak'st philosophers …’ (II, ccvii). The idyllic Haidée episode evokes a tragic apostrophe; Eliot's ‘Chill / Fingers of yew … curled / Down on us’ are anticipated in

Oh, Love! what is it in this world of ours
          Which makes it fatal to be loved? Ah why
With cypress branches hast thou wreathed thy bowers,
          And made thy best interpreter a sigh?

(III, ii)

and the irony of ‘Oh, Hesperus! thou bringest all good things …’ (III, cvii) with its emphasis on human relationship and parental love is infused with deep pathos. The quotation from or paraphrase of Sappho here balances and corrects the Campbell complacency (note the echo of Campbell's ‘wreathed’ in Byron's ‘entwine’, ‘this world of ours’ in ‘such a wilderness as this’, and ‘a sigh’ in ‘perfect bliss’). ‘In my end is my beginning’: the two apostrophes perfectly contain the first great movement of the poem, where Juan can still be seen as ‘innocent’.

The second movement opens at the poem's mid-point (on a rough stanza count) with a significant collocation of Love and Glory. Love existing in its own right is no longer the theme.

O Love! O Glory! what are ye who fly
          Around us ever, rarely to alight?

(VII, i)

We are about to pass into the brutal power world of the siege of Ismail and its sequel, where love is corrupted to lust. In ‘Oh, thou eternal Homer!’ (VII, lxxix) the apostrophe implicitly recognises the right of violence to exist ‘wreathed’ with love, and the two siege cantos lead directly into the power-lust world in which the devouring vulva is the sardonic centre. On the ‘teterrima causa’ I have already sufficiently commented. This is the last of Byron's addresses to the mater hominum et deorum, though the poem is scarce half finished. It is followed by an apostrophe to Catherine:

Oh Catherine! (for of all interjections,
          To thee both oh! and ah! belong, of right,
In Love and War). …

(IX, lxv)²⁷

—where the identification of the empress with the vulva is undisguised, and the reflective passage (lxxiii-lxxvi) which follows sums up the themes of all the preceding apostrophes. First Campbell is confuted:

And that's enough, for Love is vanity,
          Selfish in its beginning as its end …

Next, his own ‘Oh never more, my heart …’ in

Except where 'tis a mere insanity,
          A maddening spirit which would strive to blend
Itself with Beauty's frail inanity …

Then, the philosophers:

And hence some heathenish philosophers
Make Love the main-spring of the Universe.

Platonic love, divine love, marital love, even cicisbean love (poor Teresa!) are next deflated, together with the exigences of the sexual impulse:

Besides Platonic love, besides the love
          Of God, the love of sentiment, the loving
Of faithful pairs … besides all these pretences
To Love, there are those things which words name senses;
Those movements, those improvements in our bodies
          Which make all bodies anxious to get out
Of their own sand-pits, to mix with a goddess,
          For such all women are at first no doubt. …
The third sort to be noted in our chronicle
          As flourishing in every Christian land,
Is, when chaste matrons to their other ties
Add what may be called marriage in disguise.

(IX, lxxiii-lxxvi)

And at this point the invocations to love terminate. In fact all apostrophes terminate, with the exception of the passing invocation to gold in Canto XII, iii, and the longer address to death in Canto XV, viii-ix, which is itself implicated in the commercial-political-social complex which encroaches like a cancer on the hitherto vigorous natural growth of Juan's life-pattern.

The real/unreal love antithesis is vigorously and brilliantly pursued through the six final cantos, which examine the Regency scene in England in the light of all that Byron/Juan has experienced in his earlier avatars. The initial excursus on Berkeley in Canto XI poses the real/unreal theme philosophically. Doubt is the ‘sole prism / Of the Truth's rays’ (ii)²⁸ but Byron begs pathetically to be allowed to drink his dram of ‘Heaven's brandy’, illusion, undisturbed. Of course it won't do: reality keeps breaking in.

Notes

1. The opening line of the Prologue to ‘The Gates of Paradise’. ‘The Keys of the Gates’ is the subtitle given to the 24 consecutive couplets from which my section headings in this chapter are taken.

2. Blake, Jerusalem, III, 64 (Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes, London 1957, p. 698).

3. Derived from ‘her great great grand-mamma’ (lvi); Haidée, in Juan's next love adventure, has a Moorish mother (IV, liv). Byron's insistence on these Eastern, Islamic ingredients is important for his whole doctrine of love.

4. I have already made it in ‘Guilt and retribution in Byron's sea poems’ (loc. cit.).

5. Also, as Karl Kroeber has well noted, of his milieu: ‘Juan is victimised as much by a complicated network of social relationships [much like those Byron met in Venice] … as by the upsurge of his sensual appetite. He is brought into contact with Julia through his mother's offices’ (Romantic Narrative Art, University of Wisconsin Press, 1960, p. 150). In like manner, Donna Inez approves of Juan's ‘friendship’ with Catherine the Great (see below, p. 324).

6. An odd thing, belonging clearly to the dream level of the episode rather than to any realistic plot structure, is that Juan's shoes are not discovered during the very thorough search at Alfonso's first entry.

7. The direct reference to Childe Harold here is interesting.

8. See below, p. 304. And the even earlier cannibalistic episode in the long-boat, where Julia's precious letter is torn up to make lots to decide who shall first be eaten by his famishing companions (II, lxxiv).

9. The extent of Byron's acquaintance with Zoroastrianism has yet to be assessed, but a passage like this (quoted in R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi, Allen & Unwin, 1956, p. 43) seems relevant ‘I created thee … with a mouth close to thy buttocks, and coition seems to thee even as the taste of the sweetest food to the mouth.’ See also below, p. 322. I cannot at this point prove a connection, but the quotation may perhaps be permitted to stand as, in Coleridge's Kubla Khan phrase, ‘a psychological curiosity’.

10. ‘But why will she grow fat? and you too?’ he writes to Miss Mercer Elphinstone on 3 August 1812. ‘That additional wing (with a bit of the breast superadded I dare say) is worse than waltzing.—But as I actually dined yesterday myself, I must bear these trespasses’ (MLJ ii, 187). Cf. also MLJ ii, 219: ‘I am sadly out of practice lately, except for a few sighs to a gentlewoman at supper who was too much occupied with ye fourth wing of her second chicken to mind anything that was not material.’

11. Readers unfamiliar with the Greyfriars saga will find their best introduction to it in George Orwell's essay, ‘Boys' Weeklies’, in Critical Essays, 1951.

12. ‘Very sulky … and ate in consequence a copious dinner … (I have added, lately, eating to my “family of vices”)’ (Diary, 4-5 January 1821). Byron's eating habits form a reliable index to his spiritual ups and downs. Contrast this, to his mother en route from the Levant, 25 June 1811: ‘I must only inform you that for a long time I have been restricted to an entirely vegetable diet, neither fish nor flesh coming within my regimen. … I drink no wine.’

13. The Wisdom of Solomon: see my The Lost Travellers, p. 174, for a link with The Ancient Mariner.

14. References to the Cornish wreckers occur in Byron's letters of this period, e.g. LJ, v, 272.

15. The serpent image here conflates with that of Eve.

16. The MS reads ‘a sad Southey’, a further complication leading into Byron's personal resentments.

17. ‘A man actually becomes a piece of female property’, Byron writes in a letter to R. B. Hoppner (31 January 1820) describing his life in Italy. The fifth Canto was finished in November 1820.

18. [Charles Reade: a study in Victorian authorship, New York, 1900], pp. 340-41.

19. For purposes of exposition I pass over the Russian episode (Cantos IX-X) at this point, to take it up on p. 322.

20. This is something I half-undertook in ‘Guilt and retribution in Byron's sea poems’ (REL, ii, no. 1, January 1961), before reading Ferenzci's book.

21. If most of Don Juan consists of ‘addresses from the throne’ (III, xcvi) this is an ‘address to the throne’, Byron's homage as dutiful subject and vassal.

22. See above, pp. 62-5.

23. Cf. ‘Detached Thoughts, 102’ (1821): ‘What a strange thing is the propagation of life! a bubble of Seed which might be spilt in a whore's lap—or in the orgasm of a voluptuous dream—might (for ought we know) have formed a Caesar or a Buonaparte: there is nothing remarkable recorded of their sires, that I know of.’ With engaging frankness, Prof. M. K. Joseph selects the last couplet of the stanza (lvi) to sum up his indebtedness to his wife and children in the writing of his Byron the Poet (Acknowledgements, p. 10). Byron would certainly have approved.

24. A distinction has to be drawn between counterpointing and deflating. Byron's common technique of juxtaposing sanctities with profanities is one thing; the deliberate use of sanctities for profane ends is another. So is the offence against Latin and Greek quantity!

25. Teresa in fact released him, ‘provided it [the continuation of Don Juan] were immaculate; so I have been as decent as need be’ (Letter of 27 August 1822 to Moore).

26. These may be compared with the dramatic invocations which I refer to on pp. 244-50 above. Ginevra, published in the same year as Cain (1821), has ‘Life's great cheat; a thing / Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining’ (36-7).

27. The gasps of ‘death’ in its obvious sense (dying soldiers) and its metaphorical (‘dying’ lovers). ‘Oh’ may represent the indrawn breath at the onset of the orgasm, ‘ah’ the expiration at its finale; or more broadly the optimistic expectation at the beginning of coitus and the omne animal triste sigh at its ending.

28. It is worth while connecting this with the Childe Harold prism moments (see above, pp. 196-7) to see the shift in stance from idealism to realism.

A Select Bibliography

(Place of publication London, unless stated otherwise.)

Separate Works:

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt. Cantos I and II (1812); Canto III (1816); Canto IV (1818); Cantos I-IV were collected in 2 vols (1819).

The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813).

Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern with appropriate Symphonies and Accompaniments (1815).

Don Juan. Cantos I and II (1819); Cantos III, IV, V (1821); Cantos VI, VII, VIII (1823); Cantos IX, X, XI (1823); Cantos XII, XIII, XIV (1823); Cantos XV, XVI (1824) originally published anonymously.

[Don Juan.] first collected edition, 2 vols, Edinburgh 1825; ed. T. G. Steffan and W. W. Pratt, 4 vols, Austin, Texas 1957; (the fullest edition, of which Vol. I contains a detailed study of the composition of the poem). A useful one-volume edition in the Penguin English Poets series (1973) includes some notes and variant readings.

The Island: Or, Christian and His Comrades (1823).

Diaries, Letters, etc.

Letter to [John Murray] on the Rev. W. L. Bowles' Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope (1821).

Correspondence of Lord Byron with a Friend, including his Letters to his Mother in 1809-11, ed. A. R. C. Dallas, 3 vols; Paris (1825).

Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life, by T. Moore, 2 vols (1830, revised edition 1875).

Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero, 6 vols (1898-1904).

Poems and Letters, edited from the original MSS. in the possession of W. K. Bixby, by W. N. C. Carlton; privately printed, Chicago (1912).

Lord Byron's Correspondence, chiefly with Lady Melbourne, Mr Hobhouse, the Hon. Douglas Kinnaird, and P. B. Shelley, ed. John Murray, 2 vols (1922).

Selected Letters, ed. V. H. Collins; Oxford (1928).

The Ravenna Journal, mainly compiled at Ravenna in 1821, with an Introduction by Lord Ernle [R. E. Prothero] (1928)

[The Ravenna Journal,] printed for the members of the First Edition Club.

Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand, three volumes are so far published (1973-4), presents ‘the complete and unexpurgated text of all the letters available in manuscript and the full printed version of all others’. R. E. Prothero's edition continues to be indispensable for its scholarly notes and valuable illustrations.

Lord Byron: Selected Prose, ed. P. Gunn, in The Penguin English Library (1972)

[Lord Byron: Selected Prose,] a well-chosen anthology of the letters and journals.