SOURCE: Boyd, Elizabeth French. “The Literary Background of Don Juan: Incidents.” In Byron's Don Juan: A Critical Study, pp. 112-38. New York: The Humanities Press, 1958.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1945, Boyd examines several figures and events that may have inspired various characters and scenes in Don Juan.]

Don Juan is a compound of self-expression and literary reminiscence. We have seen that Byron wrote fundamentally from his own feelings and ideas, and that when he read, he was likewise habitually conscious of himself and his world at the center of the book. He identified himself with characters, and visualized scenes, making them his own. He associated scenes and ideas from one book to another, and from books to his own life. The details that appealed to him were those that corroborated his own experience and tastes. In all Byron's poetry, therefore, purely autobiographical elements are blended with echoes of the literature he had absorbed so deeply as to make it part of himself. Thus his poetry has both personal and cultural qualities to appeal to his readers. In the following analysis of each section of Don Juan, I shall endeavor to show how the personal elements are fused with the literary, and thus to restore the full literary flavor of the poem for modern readers.

1

The motto of the first and second cantos of Don Juan may perhaps be blamed for part of the public conviction that Byron was writing literal autobiography. He selected it from Horace's Ars Poetica: “Difficile est proprie communia dicere,” “It is hard to treat in your own way what is common.” Byron's friends took this to be a confession that he was writing about his domestic affairs, which were certainly common property. In Horace's context, communia means literary subjects which have been often handled by the poets and are well-known to the public, for he continues, “you are doing better in spinning into acts a song of Troy than if, for the first time, you were giving the world a theme unknown and unsung.”¹ The motto was highly appropriate for a new version of the Don Juan legend. Byron was noted, however, not only for public confessions in his poetry, but for puns, and Hobhouse in his letter of January 8, 1819, advising Byron not to publish Don Juan, must have accused Byron of substituting in his mind for communia the words domestica facta.² Replying on January 25, Byron said:

“The motto ‘domestica facta’ merely meant common life which, I presume, was Horace's meaning—the Julian adventure detailed was none of mine; but one of an acquaintance of mine (Parolini by name), which happened some years ago at Bassano, with the Prefect's wife when he was a boy; and was the subject of a long case, ending in a divorce or separation of the parties during the Italian Viceroyalty. …”³

Byron's understanding of communia as common life, and his further interpretation of that phrase as what had actually occurred within his knowledge, throw light on his conception of the term Nature, an eighteenth century concept based in part on this very passage in Horace. As with Beppo, Byron was founding his story on an anecdote from real life, resolved to incorporate nothing in Juan's adventures except actual fact.

Although Parolini's story may have been uppermost in his mind, there is undeniable autobiography in his account of it, for example, the characterization of Donna Inez, who combines the features of both Byron's wife and his mother, and the resemblance of the whole plot to an affair of Byron's Southwell days, when he is supposed to have been allowed undue freedom with the daughter of a neighboring family who hoped thereby to entrap him for her husband. Perhaps there is autobiographical recollection in the closing scene of the Julia episode, when Juan becomes seasick while reading Julia's letter. The letter with its insistence on the singleness of Julia's love, now irrevocably lost, reminds us of Byron's sets of farewell verses to Mary Chaworth upon his leaving England in 1809. Yet the Lines to Mr. Hodgson Written on Board the Lisbon Packet, at the same time, though not then published, show Byron, the sufferer from love, in high spirits and surrounded by the seasick:

“Hobhouse muttering fearful curses,
          As the hatchway down he rolls,
Now his breakfast, now his verses,
          Vomits forth—and damns our souls.
                    ‘Here's a stanza
                    On Braganza—
          Help!’—‘A couplet?’—‘No, a cup
                    Of warm water—’
                    ‘What's the matter?’
          ‘Zounds! my liver's coming up! …
“But, since Life at most a jest is,
          As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
          Then laugh on—as I do now.
                    Laugh at all things,
                    Great and small things,
          Sick or well, at sea or shore. …”

If Parolini's anecdote and Byron's reminiscences are at the bottom of the Julia episode, it is a case of real life imitating art, for the plot is a commonplace of fabliau and comedy. Analogues abound, wherein a young gallant, innocent like Juan, or a scheming gay blade, seduces the young and pious wife of a stupid old husband. Byron would have learned from Dunlop's History of Fiction the “genealogy” of this fabliau at least from the novelle of Franco Sacchetti, ca. 1400 (who imitated the Decameron), to Casti's Novelle Amorose (1804). Dunlop selects as a typical example to relate the French version entitled La Culotte des Cordeliers:⁴

“It is there told, that a merchant's wife in Orleans had a clerk for a gallant. The husband came home one night unexpectedly. The clerk had time to escape, but left an essential article of dress behind him, which, on the following morning the husband put on by mistake. Before evening he remarked the change in his clothes, and on his return home reproached his wife with infidelity.”

The wife gets out of her dilemma by providing that the clothing shall appear to have been a present from the Franciscans for the greater fertility of her husband. Dunlop says, “Of all these tales the origin may, perhaps, be a story in Apuleius, where a gallant is detected by the husband from having left his sandals.”⁵

The novella of Casti mentioned by Dunlop in this series is La Brache di San Griffone, but Casti gives another version also in I Calzoni Ricamati. In this story, Giuditta, the wife of Master Piero of Amsterdam, yields to the love-making of Lord Boxton, who is touring Europe to discover whether there is any difference among the women of various countries. Her husband returns one night unexpectedly from a business trip and surprises them; Giuditta just has time to hide the milord under the sofa in the totally darkened room. She pretends to have the colic and sends Piero after some acqua cattolica at the chemist's. Piero dresses in the dark and hurries off full of concern for his wife's illness, but when he comes to pay for the medicine, he finds to his amazement that his money has turned into an English guinea, and that he has on a strange pair of richly embroidered breeches, with a watch and jeweled chain in the pocket. Advised by the chemist, he suppresses the obvious but dishonorable conclusion, and shames his wife into good behavior by his forbearance. “I have gained these rich spoils,” he tells her, “and I shall take them from the closet every eight days in your honor.”

Incidentally, still another of Casti's novelle, the fourth, entitled La Diavolessa, has been cited by many critics, E. H. Coleridge, Helene Richter, and R. D. Waller among them, as an analogue of Don Juan, Cantos I and II. Don Ignazio, a Spanish hidalgo, friend of Don Juan Tenorio and brought up with him in the same kind of education, pursues a brilliant career of scandalous amours in Seville, and at last runs away with his mistress Ermengilda. They are captured by pirates, their ship is wrecked, and Don Ignazio alone survives, cast up naked on the sandy beach. He gathers wreckage—“casks” and “biscuits”—to support himself; he finds a cave to live in, and then a hut; he becomes a penitent anchorite and is tempted by the Devil in many guises. Finally the Devil appears to him disguised as Ermengilda miraculously raised from the dead. Don Ignazio, forgetting his religious vows, marries with a common-law ceremony this Diavolessa. After a week, she whisks him off to Hell, where he rejoins his friend Don Juan.

The compressed simplicity and bareness of Casti's stories, however, convey none of the illusion of real life to be found in Byron's. Byron has borrowed, too, from richer versions of the Apuleian fabliau. He may have known it in romantic guise in C. P. Duclos's Histoire de Madame de Luz, in which he would also have read the history of his reputed French ancestor the Marechal de Biron. He undoubtedly knew it with all its trimmings of hypocrisy in Machiavelli's Mandragola. The heroine of that comedy, Lucrezia, is like Donna Julia in character—pious, easily led, capable of self-deception, femininely whimsical. Her mother, Sostrata, though a simpler character than Donna Inez, shares her complete hypocrisy and her function as half-conscious go-between. Regnard's play, The Divorce, is similar, especially in the tirades of the young wife feigning injured innocence to her irritating lord and master. The whole tradition of the fabliau from Boccaccio to Casti was in Byron's mind as he wrote, and the scene of climax that November night in Donna Julia's bedroom is improved by all that Byron had learned from English, French, and Italian comedy.

2

It seems unlikely that Casti's La Diavolessa played any important part in Byron's account of Don Juan's voyage and shipwreck. Aside from the fact that disaster at sea and the rescue of the hero by a simple maiden whom he proceeds to seduce were conventional features of the Don Juan legend, Byron's other models would have suggested their inclusion. Tempest and shipwreck have been conventional subjects of the epic since the Odyssey. Greek romance made the most of this convention, and picaresque romance in its turn did not neglect its advantages. The supreme example of shipwreck in Robinson Crusoe only gave a new impetus of realism and actuality to this favorite episode. The Monthly Magazine, as E. H. Coleridge notes in his edition of Don Juan, very soon brought out a complete analysis of Byron's indebtedness to Sir G. Dalzell's Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, 1812, a very remarkable collection of firsthand accounts of wrecks. Coleridge adds to the documentation of Canto II the hints that Byron used from “his grand-dad's narrative,” from Bligh's Mutiny on the Bounty, from Hartford's Remarkable Shipwrecks, 1813, and from the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz.

Byron told Trelawney, when they were fitting out the Bolivar, that Trelawney would “find him nothing but a land-lubber. I hardly know the stem from the stern, and don't know the name or use of a single rope or sail. … All the sea-terms I use are from authority, and they cost me toil and trouble to look them out.”⁶ The realism resulting from this painful research was too strong for the British stomach. Byron's public objected to the juxtaposition of the terrible and the ridiculous in such unveiled terms. Even Shelley, in the midst of his enthusiastic comments on the first two cantos, felt a little repelled:

“What a strange and terrible storm is that at sea,” he wrote to Byron, “and the two fathers, how true, yet how strong a contrast! Dante hardly exceeds it. … The love letter, and the account of its being written, is altogether a masterpiece of portraiture. … I cannot say I equally approve of the service to which this letter was appropriated; or that I altogether think the bitter mockery of our common nature, of which this is one of the expressions, quite worthy of your genius.”⁷

To us, who have been dulled by all too frequent repetitions in our daily newspapers of this story of wreck and disaster at sea, the objections of the public seem incomprehensible. They were prompted by that sentimentality which demanded prettiness and sublimity in poetry and refused ugliness and the grotesque, no matter how true to life. Such things belonged in prose, in the picaresque novel for instance, like Roderick Random, where we find in brief a wreck, decorated with rum and religion, somewhat similar to that of the “Trinidada.”

The prose documentation of Byron's shipwreck, like the Parolini episode, was merely an extension and corroboration of Byron's own experience, for one of the events in his first visit to Greece which made a deep impression on him was the near-disaster at sea that he and Hobhouse underwent in trying to sail from Prevesa to Patras in a Turkish ship of war. Hobhouse gives his account of this experience in his Journey Through Albania,⁸ and Byron wrote a characteristically amusing description of it to his mother:

“Two days ago I was nearly lost in a Turkish ship of war, owing to the ignorance of the captain and crew, though the storm was not violent. Fletcher yelled after his wife, the Greeks called on all the saints, the Mussulmans on Alla; the captain burst into tears and ran below decks telling us to call on God; the sails were split, the main-yard shivered, the wind blowing fresh, the night setting in, and all our chance was to make Corfu … or (as Fletcher pathetically termed it) ‘a watery grave.’ I did what I could to console Fletcher, but finding him incorrigible, wrapped myself up in my Albanian capote (an immense cloak), and lay down on deck to wait the worst. I have learnt to philosophise in my travels; and if I had not, complaint was useless. Luckily the wind abated, and only drove us on the coast of Suli. …”⁹

As Moore put it, Byron remembered the emotions he had felt on this occasion, though the circumstances and details of his poetic narrative might be imaginary or borrowed from other sources than his own experience.

But he had good poetic authority, as well as prose documentation, for his shipwreck. Probably William Falconer's The Shipwreck, 1762, predominated in Byron's mind as he wrote. This poem, one of the first publications of the Murray press, had been long a favorite with Byron. An 1804 edition of it by Clarke appears in the 1816 Sale Catalogue, and Byron mentions it in his notes to Childe Harold, Canto II, as one of the reasons why Cape Colonna is especially interesting to the English traveler, for it is the site of that famous wreck.¹⁰ Two years after he wrote Don Juan, Canto II, he referred to it again at some length in his argument with Bowles over the “invariable principles of poetry.”¹¹

Superficially, Falconer's story of the storm and the shipwreck bears little resemblance to the Don Juan story. There is an exiled lover, Palemon, who gains the shore only to die after committing his sad tale of an unrelenting parent and an orphaned sweetheart to the charge of the Byronic hero, Arion. The scene is the Grecian archipelago, and there is much congenial talk of the ancient glories of Greece and its modern enslavement to the Turks. But the reasons for this poem's hold on Byron's imagination are shown in his comments on it in the Bowles controversy, revealing how it satisfied his predilections for human nature and action, for realism and authenticity:

“Is the sea itself [he wrote] a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical subject, with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship? or, in the poem of The Shipwreck, is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both much undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry. …

“In what does the infinite superiority of Falconer's Shipwreck over all other shipwrecks consist? In his admirable application of the terms of his art; in a poet-sailor's description of the sailor's fate. These very terms, by his application, make the strength and reality of his poem.”

An authentic narrative of a great and losing struggle between man and inanimate nature, delivered in a high-pitched emotional key, was exactly the sort of thing to appeal to Byron's mind. Biased as he was in supposing that a piling up of facts was the same thing as the truth, he fell into the same error of taste—though not to such an abysmal extent—as Falconer, by using painstaking realism in the technical details. Falconer's Shipwreck was applauded, in spite of its boring factualness, but Byron's was not, and the reason for its failure with the public was its hard-boiled manner. A sustained high emotional tone was not the pitch for Don Juan, but a humorous middle tone, varied by abrupt changes to the sublime.

Ariosto's shipwreck, a famous passage in the Orlando Furioso, described entirely in his high heroic strain, must also have been in Byron's mind, for his shipwreck matches Ariosto's in many details and fully equals it when he chooses to raise the tone. Byron had some thoughts at this time of translating Ariosto, but left the task to his friend W. S. Rose, who was already engaged upon it. Perhaps Rose's translation was to some extent influenced by Byron's poem—I am not expert enough in Ariosto or Italian to decide; but it is interesting to compare their markedly similar descriptions of the wreck.

Rogero and his seven kings set sail from Marseilles for North Africa, but

“Upon the darkening of the day, the wind
Displays its fickle and perfidious kind.”

Through the stormy night, the pilot, the sailors, and all on board struggle at various nautical tasks to steady the ungovernable vessel. Nothing avails; fallen on her beam ends, split and leaking at every seam, the ship is about to founder. “Meanwhile, his soul to Heaven each recommends.”

“A fierce assault and cruel coil doth keep
          Upon all sides that wintry tempest fell.
Now to their sight so high the billows leap,
          It seems that these to heaven above would swell;
Now, plunging with the wave, they sink so deep,
          That they appear to spy the gulf of hell.
Small hope there is or none: with faltering breath
They gaze upon inevitable death.
“On a dispiteous sea, that livelong night,
                    They drifted, as the wind in fury blew.
The furious wind that with the dawning light
Should have abated, gathered force anew.”

The ship breaks up piecemeal, rudder, sails, and mast are carried away, and they drive on helplessly toward a bare rock:

“All to their private aims alone attend,
          And only to preserve their life have care.
Who quickest can, into the skiff descend,
          But in a thought so overcrowded are,
Through those so many who invade the boat,
That, gunwale-deep, she scarce remains afloat.
“Rogero, on beholding master, mate,
                    And men abandoning the ship with speed,
In doublet, as he is, sans mail and plate,
                    Hopes in the skiff, a refuge in that need:
But finds her overcharged with such a weight,
                    And afterwards so many more succeed,
That the o'erwhelming waves the pinnace drown,
And she with all her wretched freight goes down;
“Goes down, and, foundering, drags with her whoe'er
                    Leaving the larger bark, on her relies.
Then doleful shrieks are heard, 'mid sob and tear,
                    Calling for succour on unpitying skies:
But for short space that shrilling cry they rear;
                    For, swoln with rage and scorn, the waters rise,
And in a moment wholly stop the vent
Whence issues that sad clamour and lament.”(12)

Byron's story of shipwreck, also located in the Gulf of Lyons, carries on for many stanzas in conversational humorous style, full of circumstantial details, but as the climax of the actual wreck approaches, the tone rises and grows solemn:

“'T was twilight, and the sunless day went down
                    Over the waste of waters; like a veil,
Which, if withdrawn, would but disclose the frown
                    Of one whose hate is masked but to assail.
Thus to their hopeless eyes the night was shown,
                    And grimly darkled o'er the faces pale,
And the dim desolate deep: twelve days had Fear
Been their familiar, and now Death was here. …
“Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell—
                    Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the
                              brave,—
Then some leaped overboard with dreadful yell,
                    As eager to anticipate their grave;
And the sea yawned around her like a hell,
                    And down she sucked with her the whirling
                              wave,
Like one who grapples with his enemy,
And strives to strangle him before he die.
“And first one universal shriek there rushed,
                    Louder than the loud Ocean, like a crash
Of echoing thunder; and then all was hushed,
                    Save the wild wind, and the remorseless dash
Of billows; but at intervals there gushed,
                    Accompanied by a convulsive splash,
A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry
Of some strong swimmer in his agony.”

But even in the midst of these often quoted stanzas, Byron has inserted two in his customary voice, describing the last half-hysterical efforts of the ship's company to save themselves. The ship, having been lightened of every object that would float, at last

                    “gave a heel, and then a lurch to port,
And, going down head foremost—sunk, in short.”

These lines epitomize the prosaic, tough realism with which he elected to relate a scene hallowed by romance.

Rogero, with the superhuman strength of a chivalric hero, swims with growing vigor and unwearied mind, buoyed up by noble resolves to reform his whole way of living, and so arrives on the rocky island shore not in the least exhausted and far from drowned. But Juan endures days and nights of torment, watching his comrades die lingering and cruel deaths, and reaches shore

“With just enough of life to feel its pain,
And deem that it was saved, perhaps, in vain.”

There is symbolism in both these pictures of survival. Ariosto's is that of a good Catholic Christian, for Rogero finds on the rock the hermit who converts and baptizes him, in token of his salvation from death. Byron's symbolism, however, I venture to suggest derives from Lucretius, who strongly affected his views on man and the universe. One of the most famous images in the De Rerum Natura, which he read in the summer of 1813 with Lady Oxford, struck his imagination so forcefully that, as we have seen earlier, he used it as the basis of three separate scenes. The lines occur in a passage where Lucretius has gathered proofs of the imperfection of the universe and the undeniable existence of evil:

“Then further the child, like a sailor cast forth by the cruel waves, lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every kind of vital support, as soon as nature has spilt him forth with throes from his mother's womb into the regions of light, and he fills all around with doleful wailings; as is but just, seeing that so much trouble awaits him in life to pass through.”¹³

Faced with inexplicable and fated evil in his own life, Byron felt the pathos, the doubt, and the despair of Lucretius. The cosmic view of the hapless individual stranded in a vast, threatening, and even malignant universe is the backdrop for the Byronic melancholy, rebellion, and pessimism. Man, Byron wrote, “has always been, and always will be, an unlucky rascal.” He encountered the Lucretian passage again in Burton's chapter on Discontents, Cares, and Miseries, where Burton calls to mind Lucretius' naked mariner “cast on shore by shipwreck, cold and comfortless in an unknown land. No estate, age, sex, can secure himself from this common misery.”¹⁴

3

Peter Quennell has observed that Greece and youth were equated in Byron's mind. Byron thought in 1816 that he had said all he had to say on Greece; its scenes were fading and confusing in his memory, and he dreaded committing the error deplored by Voltaire of over writing his material. But nothing in his former pictures of Greece surpasses Don Juan, Cantos II-IV, in beauty and reality. It would be useless to conjecture about the autobiographical reminiscences contained in them; they are manifest and abundant. But the literary associations of the Haidée episode, as of the seraglio one to follow, are less obvious and should be noted. Here we enter the maze of connections linking oriental romance and European literature, which I do not propose to thread but only to sketch. For I am convinced that the nexus of oriental fiction, ancient and modern, was present in Byron's mind as a source of inspiration.

The formula of shipwreck, innocent, passionate love, and piracy in the Mediterranean is as old as the Greek romances, with which Byron's Venetian library was amply stocked. Dunlop's History of Fiction told him in its first chapter all about the Greek romances; in the second, about Apuleius and Petronius; copies of all these he bought in Venice. He would also have learned Dunlop's conjectures on the perpetuation of these romantic fictions, together with all classical mythology and superstitions, in the medieval romances, such as Amadis de Gaul¹⁵ and Huon of Bordeaux. At the other end of time, in his own experience, he knew these aspects of oriental adventure at first hand, and had heard, collected, and translated some of the Greek ballads (dating, many of them, from the late middle ages) representing popular traditions on similar materials. His response to the whole body of oriental fiction resembles that of Scott and the other romanticists and Gothic novelists to the traditions of western medieval romance and balladry. Byron took the time-worn stuff of Greek and medieval oriental romance and breathed life and truth and passion into it. Dressed in the actual style and setting of the Orient, the Haidée episode is as fresh and real as an eye-witness account.

Byron says at the conclusion of Haidée's story:

“But many a Greek maid in a loving song
                    Sighs o'er her name; and many an islander
With her Sire's story makes the night less long. …”

In a note to the Bride of Abydos, Byron mentions his acquaintance with the recent exploits of the contemporary historical Lambro; but his acquaintance with the Haidée story, and possible ballads recording it, is more shadowy. The name Haidée, we know from Byron's own translation of the ballad “Belovèd and Fair Haidée,” occurred within his knowledge in popular Greek songs. Its meaning, “a caress,” or “the caressed one,” is appropriate to Don Juan, Cantos II-IV. Samuel Baud-Bovy, in his La Chanson Populaire Grecque du Dodécanèse, records many variants of ballads on “La fille injustement tuée” by cruel brothers or parents for her love to a stranger.¹⁶ Any one of these may have been Byron's original. The testimony of historical reality furnished by the appearance of the story in ballad form would perhaps satisfy his fact loving nature, even if he had no more substantial proof of its occurrence in real life. As for the famous interpolated song, “The isles of Greece,” its affinity to the Greek patriotic ballads, like “Arise, sons of the Hellenes,” is obvious.

Daphnis and Chloe, however, and Theagenes and Characlea, are the literary ancestors of Juan and Haidée. Byron also knew their modern counterparts in Paul and Virginie; indeed, the eighteenth century tradition of the island romance is the “source” of Haidée's character and of her love for Juan. As in the Greek romances, the love-idyll of Juan and Haidée is interrupted by the pirate, blood and thunder, wounds and separation. The recognition scene between Lambro, apparently raised from the dead, and Haidée torn between filial devotion and fear for her endangered lover, is rendered in the best style of melodramatic romance. But unlike the Greek romances, or their medieval equivalents, no room is left for a happy reunion. Haidée dies a lingering death, her mind eclipsed by sorrow, and her unborn child dies with her. In three elegiac stanzas Byron records her tomb and her father's, the desolate isle, and the ballads of the Greeks upon her love and her father's exploits.

M. Anton Blanck, in an article entitled “Floires et Blanceflor” et l'épisode de Haidée dans le “Don Juan” de Byron,¹⁷ has called attention to some interesting parallels between that twelfth century romance and Byron's story. Both stories begin in Spain and proceed to the Orient. In both, a pair of seventeen-year-old lovers, one Christian and the other Muslim (for Haidée, though said to be acquainted by name with Hell and Purgatory, is half-Moorish in blood and wholly pagan in ideas), experience a perfect love idyll, interrupted by the cruel guardian of the girl. In Floires and Blanceflor, the religious differences are reversed, for Floires is the Muslim, and Blanceflor the Christian. She is sold to the emir of Babylon, whither Floires patiently pursues her. He finds his way into the fantastic, highly decorated tower where she is kept, and there they enjoy their love in scenes of oriental luxury. At last the emir becomes suspicious and upon coming to the tower himself to find Blanceflor, discovers her fast asleep in Floires' arms. They wake to see his naked sword suspended over them, which he withholds until he can learn the young man's name. This romance has a happy ending, for the emir's heart is melted by Floires' constancy, and the young lovers are united in marriage. But the conception of innocent natural love, and the contrast between tender hellenic grace and oriental cruelty are the same in both Floires and Blanceflor and Don Juan.

It seems very improbable, however, that Byron knew either Floires and Blanceflor or its near relation Aucassin and Nicolette. M. Blanck grants the unlikelihood, but points out that Byron could have been acquainted with the story in Boccaccio's Il Filocolo, which Hunt had just drawn to the attention of Keats. Why should not Hunt have mentioned it to Byron also? This may have happened, but I feel sure that Byron would not have found the intensely prosaic Filocolo congenial, in spite of its “Questions of Love.” He never mentions it, and whenever he speaks of Boccaccio, “the bard of prose,” it is to speak of the Decameron, which he was reading in Venice as early as 1817.

Aside from the fact that Floires and Blanceflor is a medieval descendant of the Greek romances, the resemblance of the Haidée episode to it is more probably due to Wieland's Oberon. For Oberon is founded on the romance of Huon of Bordeaux, which in turn is closely allied to Floires et Blanceflor,¹⁸ and Byron knew Wieland's modern version of Huon through Sotheby's translation. In Dunlop's History of Fiction, Byron would have found the entire story of Huon of Bordeaux with its analogues,¹⁹ both from the Arabian Nights and from German prose fiction, all preceded by a short paragraph ascribing praise to Wieland's use of the material in Oberon, and to Sotheby's “beautiful translation” which has rendered the story “universally known.” Dunlop concludes his discussion:

“Huon is a more interesting character than most of the knights of Charlemagne. Even his weakness and disobedience of Oberon arise from excess of love or the ardour of military enterprise; and our prepossession in his favour is much enhanced by a mildness of nature and tenderness of heart, superior to that of other heroes of chivalry.”²⁰

Alaric Watts, in the already mentioned articles on Byron's plagiarisms, was quick to pounce upon the similarity of Don Juan to Oberon. He had already been accusing Byron of borrowing without acknowledgment from Sotheby in the Corsair. The scene between Gulnare and the Corsair in prison, he found to resemble too closely the prison scene between Almansaris and Huon in Oberon, Canto XII. Now he points out the similarities between the island love affair of Juan and Haidée and that of Huon and Amanda. Unfortunately for the immediate effect of his arguments, Watts confused Amanda and Almansaris in his comparisons. Byron was able to toss this off: “Much is coincidence.” But if he had not been borrowing from Sotheby's translation of Oberon in Don Juan, Cantos II-IV, he certainly had been in Canto V, written five months before he read Watts's articles, but not published until some months after. Watts reproaches Byron, and indeed he seems to deserve it, for his unkind criticisms of the good Botherby in Beppo and for his lines in Don Juan, Canto I:

“Thou shalt not covet Mr. Sotheby's Muse,
                    His Pegasus, nor anything that's his. …”

These remarks, Watts says, are particularly ungrateful from Byron, since “besides innumerable imitations of his style and diction, he has resorted to his pages … for ideas, language to clothe them in, and sometimes for principal portions of the machinery he employs in his poems.” It is too bad for Watts that he could not have written this after Don Juan, Canto V, was published.

Byron wrote in his Journal at Ravenna, a few weeks after he had completed this canto, that he had read “much less of Goethe, and Schiller, and Wieland, than I could wish. I only know them through the medium of English, French, and Italian translations.”²¹ It is not possible to trace from published records when he first became acquainted with Sotheby's translation of Oberon, but by 1814 he must have known something of the original at least, not only from Dunlop, but from Mme. de Staël's enthusiastic account in De L'Allemagne:

“Wieland,” she wrote, “a imité Voltaire dans ses romans; souvent Lucien, qui, sous le rapport philosophique, est le Voltaire de l'antiquité; quelquefois l'Arioste, et, malheureusement aussi, Crébillon.”²²

This was exactly calculated to arouse Byron's curiosity, mentioning as it does so many of his favorite authors as Wieland's models; it is not surprising to find him reading Agathon, to see a copy of Aristippus in the 1827 Sale Catalogue, and to suspect his acquaintance with Don Sylvio de Rosalva. Mme. de Staël went on to recite part of the story of Oberon, up to the island episode, but she left it unfinished. Byron must have resorted to Sotheby's translation, if he did not know it already, for it is the last three cantos of the poem on which he has relied for “materials” in the scene between Gulbeyaz and Juan in Canto V.

Juan has just been forcibly torn from his Haidée by her pirate father, and has been sent away to Constantinople to be sold as a slave. Huon likewise was separated from Amanda on the island, when she was brutally abducted by pirates to be sold into slavery in Tunis. After much suffering, Huon is wafted by enchantment straight to Tunis to the cottage of Ibrahim, the head gardener of the royal palace. Huon assumes the disguise of a slave and works in the seraglio gardens, in the fond expectation of reunion with Amanda; she, he hears, was miraculously preserved when the pirate ship was struck by lightning upon entering Tunis harbor, and is now the honored guest of the Sultan. Meanwhile Almansaris, the Sultana, neglected like Gulbeyaz, encounters Huon in the gardens and falls in love with him. As Gulbeyaz contrives with Juan, so Almansaris smuggles Huon into the seraglio for a private interview. Huon expects and hopes to see his Amanda again at any minute, and is firmly true to her through all temptations. But Juan has no hope of ever seeing Haidée again, and his mourning for her and faithfulness to her are more within the bounds of probability.

Gulbeyaz and Almansaris exactly resemble each other in circumstances, character, and even outward appearance. “Never,” wrote Sotheby of Almansaris,

                              “will Nature in her loveliest mould
So fine a model for a Venus frame,”(23)

and so on, for three stanzas of statuesque description. Byron described Gulbeyaz as

                              “rising up with such an air
As Venus rose with from the wave. …
                    Her presence was as lofty as her state;
Her beauty of that overpowering kind …”

and much more, to suggest, without describing, immortal perfection of beauty.

In Oberon, Huon is led through “a suit of endless chambers,” beginning in dim shadows and leading out into a “blaze” of “highest lustre.” A rich brocaded curtain parts and discloses the queen sitting on her golden throne, surrounded by twelve nymphs,

          “love's sisters, young and full of charms, …
Each scarcely shaded by a roseate veil.”

They are in the midst of a gorgeously decorated apartment—

“There gold and lazuli the walls o'er laid;
          There Siam and Golconda's rifled mines
Seem'd to have center'd their exhausted store,
By wanton luxury lavished o'er and o'er.”(24)

Huon “starts back like one bewilder'd and appal'd,” for he had expected to see Amanda, not this “voluptuous visionary sight”:

“Ah what to him?—a dream without delight—
          'T is not Amanda—.”

In Don Juan, the dwarfs open the great gilded bronze doors, and Baba and Juan, who have traveled “room by room, through glittering galleries, and o'er marble floors,” enter a room “still nobler than the last,” “a dazzling mass of gems, and gold, and glitter.” Here follows a brief digression on tastelessness in décor, very good from Byron who was said to have had no taste in such matters. Gulbeyaz reclines under a canopy. Her attendants were

                              “a choir of girls, ten or a dozen,
And were all clad alike; like Juan, too,
                    Who wore their uniform, …
A very nymph-like looking crew,
                    Which might have called Diana's chorus
                              ‘cousin.’”

Juan stands “admiring, at some distance.” It is noteworthy that, though Byron cannot help some innuendoes on “Diana's chorus,” he completely omits the ridiculous possibilities of Juan's feminine disguise in the dramatic scene that follows, reserving them for later when the dramatic tension has slackened.

Both ladies send away their attendants after some preliminaries, but the action between Almansaris and Huon, while similar on the whole, differs in details from that between Gulbeyaz and Juan. Both queens are imperious and straightforward in their love-making, expecting an instant response. Both Huon and Juan have their minds fixed on their absent mistresses. But Huon looks pale and sulks, and Juan bursts into tears. Both men are tempted by the voluptuous beauty of the Sultana, but each resists, Huon more staunchly, and Juan less so, who feels his virtue ebb

“As through his palms Bob Acres' valor oozed.”

Huon endures by consciously recalling Amanda, and at last openly confessing that he loves her only. Juan untangles himself from Gulbeyaz' embrace (Almansaris wants to embrace Huon but does not dare), and says he has loved, but that love is only for the free. Almansaris and Gulbeyaz respond equally to this check with passionate though silent rage, and with tears and humiliation. Throughout this scene, Byron is much more full and minute than Wieland in his psychological dissection of the feelings, assisted perhaps by Wieland's further promptings in the story of Danae and Agathon.

There are differences also in the sequels. In Oberon, Almansaris' ideas of vengeance hatch the scheme of compromising Huon in the garden myrtle-bower; there she tempts him, he resists again, and they are interrupted by the Sultan. Almansaris thereupon accuses Huon of trying to ravish her, and he is condemned to death by fire. Later she tries to rescue him from this fate, but he refuses to be rescued at the price of being untrue to Amanda, and Almansaris abandons him to his sentence, outraged at his scorn and consumed with jealousy of Amanda.

Gulbeyaz and Juan are interrupted by the arrival of the Sultan, and on the next day, when Gulbeyaz' suspicions and jealousy have been aroused by the thought of what may have passed in the harem with Dudù, she gives the order to Baba to have Juan liquidated. The double temptation of the hero, and the proof of chastity, were not in Byron's scheme.²⁵ His plot is looser, less dramatic, and more lifelike. Wieland goes on to a Tasso-like close in an incident paralleling the constancy of Olindo and Sophronia. Byron had no use for Oberon and all the fairy lore.

Once again Byron has taken a famous literary plot and retold it in terms of real life.²⁶ For the story of the Muslim lady and the Christian slave appears repeatedly in Italian, Spanish, and French literature, and probably in all the countries bordering the Mediterranean. Doubtless the adventure occurred repeatedly in real life, even up to Byron's day, in that pirate-infested sea and the neighboring Muslim and Christian civilizations. Piracy, capture, and holding for ransom persisted in the Mediterranean until 1830.

Byron knew several of the literary versions of this story. Dunlop gave him a clue to it, as follows:

“The first tale of Firenzuola, is one that has become very common in modern novels and romance. A young man being shipwrecked on the coast of Barbary, is picked up by some fishermen, and sold to the Bashaw of Tunis. He there becomes a great favourite of his master, and still more of his mistress, whom he persuades not only to assist in his escape, but to accompany him in his flight.”²⁷

Byron acquired the works of Firenzuola in Italy. The first novella²⁸ has some points in common with the first cantos of Don Juan, and is a fairly typical representative, as Dunlop says, of this plot.

Two devoted friends, wealthy nobles of Tuscany named Niccolo and Coppo, are separated by the necessity of Niccolo's going to Valencia to receive an inheritance. Setting sail from Genoa, Niccolo suffers shipwreck in a great storm, which with its effects on the ship's crew and passengers is described at length in the manner of Don Juan, Canto II, though without all the nautical accuracy. The ship breaks in two when it loses its mainmast, and Niccolo saves himself by clinging to a table, on which he floats to the coast of Barbary. The fishermen who rescue him sell him as a Christian slave to Amet of Tunis, a rich old Mussulman, who makes a pet of him and finally presents him to his young and beautiful wife. The wife falls in love with him, and after persuading herself in a long soliloquy that it is right for her to love Niccolo, who as a slave would naturally be more concerned about freedom than about love, makes a declaration to him “almost inarticulate between tears and blushes.” When he realizes the truth of her offer, he is overcome by her beauty, superior sense, and refinement. He converts her to Christianity, marries her secretly, and they live together meditating escape.

Meanwhile Coppo has traced Niccolo to Tunis and arrives to rescue him. The two friends arrange to sail away with the lady, ostensibly on a pleasure cruise for the day, and so they escape to Messina. There, through the interposition of the ambassador of Tunis, the King of Sicily returns Niccolo and the lady, in spite of their protests, to the Dey of Tunis and the revenge of Amet. Good fortune, however, blows up another storm which carries their vessel toward Leghorn, where they fall a prey to some Pisan corsairs. Ransoming themselves from these pirates, they finally reach Pisa with some of their remaining treasure. When the lady has recovered from a dangerous fever, resulting from her trials and hardships, they proceed to Florence where their friends welcome them and feast them, and they are remarried with all due ceremony. Coppo marries Niccolo's sister, and the two couples live together in exemplary harmony and nobility of life.

It will be recalled that Byron's first plan for Juan and Gulbeyaz, as he outlined the story to Medwin, was that they should escape together, and then, if Juan tired of the lady, she could easily be made to die of the plague.

As this story progressed from Italy to Spain and then to France, it took on many additional features and new emphases. The questions of religious and political conflicts were made crucial in the plot. A new character, a renegado, or a servant of the Muslim lady (like Baba), who helps the lovers to escape, was added. Finally, its principal theme became the conflict between love and honor, or love and loyalty, as the friends developed into rivals for the lady's affections.

Cervantes has two versions; the simple one, in “The Captive's Story” in Don Quixote, and the complex version in The Liberal Lover, one of his Exemplary Novels. The latter, like Wieland's Oberon, makes the triangle into a quartette, by introducing a second lady, another Christian captive. The incident of a permitted conference between the Christian lovers in the harem was thereby added to the plot. Scudéri's Ibrahim presents still another version.²⁹ The novelette in Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux called “The Force of Friendship” is a complete and a highly successful example of the tale. Canto I of Casti's Tartar Poem is another analogue, with the additional feature of threatened emasculation of the hero.

Byron probably knew all these versions, but if he was relating in Don Juan, Canto V, merely his own account of a famous fictional plot, what becomes of his claim that every adventure of Don Juan is drawn from real life? He may, indeed, have heard of some such incident from an acquaintance, or he may have felt that Cervantes' autobiographical “Captive's Tale” was sufficient proof of its occurrence. But luckily he knew the version of the story set down by Jean-François Regnard as autobiography in his novelette La Provençale. Byron knew about Regnard's works from Grimm's Correspondence, and apparently before composing Canto V, he had just acquired a set of Regnard in the Paris edition of 1810, republished in 1820.³⁰La Provençale, “a true story,” appears in Volume I; it combines the features of Firenzuola's story and Cervantes' Liberal Lover, and is closely parallel to Wieland's Oberon, Cantos X-XII. Though it lacks the finesse and dramatic quality of Wieland's version, which are reflected in Byron's, it must have encouraged Byron to use Wieland, by furnishing evidence of Wieland's truth to reality in the purported actual adventures of Regnard.

Regnard's story, however, was more congenial to Byron in tone than Wieland's. Such passages as the following, would have struck sympathetic chords in Byron's mind:

“Love, among the Turks, is not armed with spikes but covered with flowers. … The ladies make all the advances: the law of nature is supreme, which they follow preferably to that of Mohammed, because they are women before they are Turks.

“[The hero's] restlessness did not permit him long to remain in the same place; and, like those people who have suffered from prolonged insomnia, he sought his repose in agitation. … It mattered little to him where he went, provided that he put himself at a distance. He flattered himself, even with pleasure, that the cold of the north might a little assuage his ardor. … Drawn along always by his restlessness, he traveled in Turkey, in Hungary, in Germany. But what good did it do him to flee afar, if he could not flee from himself, and if he was inseparable from his own grief? He found many other places, but he encountered nowhere indifference.”³¹

Juan also, though not voluntarily, journeys away from love, Haidée, and the seraglio toward the north, and in the snows of Russia is overcome by melancholy and restless ennui.

4

Before leaving the seraglio scenes, we should consider the Blackwood's Magazine accusation that Byron had merely adapted Louvet's Chevalier de Faublas in Don Juan, Canto VI.³² This little volume pretends to be the authentic memoirs of the sixteen-year-old De Faublas, covering his love adventures in Paris in 1783-84. It contains practically all the hackneyed plots of secret amours; the central plot is a triangle situation among De Faublas, the Marquis and the Marquise de B., similar to the plot of Der Rosenkavalier. De Faublas's mistress, the Marquise de B., first receives him when, by a series of misunderstandings, his masquerade as a young lady is not penetrated, at least ostensibly, until he is safely abed with her. The description of his unrobing from his masquerade costume is like Don Juan, VI, 61-62:

“I found myself in great embarrassment when it became necessary for me to disengage myself from these garments whose usage was so little familiar to me. I broke strings, I tore out pins, I pricked myself on this side and tore myself on the other; the more I hurried, the less speed I made.”³³

The story is conducted with a high degree of verisimilitude and wit, some scenes being actually dramatized like a comedy. I think it highly possible that Byron had read this novel and many another like it, but as for Canto VI being based upon it, that is nonsense. The gentle, almost meditative beauty of that Canto has nothing in common with the lush, brutal sentimentality of De Faublas's amours. On the contrary, I think that Byron had in mind a satiric repudiation of that kind of “amatory writing,” and for that reason he fails to give any satisfaction to a lasciviously imaginative reader. He skates on thin ice, with the utmost grace, but he never breaks through. The chaste and touching description of Dudù is probably a portrait from life, perhaps of one of the Macri girls at Athens, or the “Dudù” whom he knew there in 1810-11.³⁴ Cervantes may also have assisted his comprehension of the innocence and boredom of the harem life in his Exemplary Novel called The Jealous Husband; Byron may have picked up his title for the duenna, “The Mother of the Maids,” from James Mabbe's translation of this novel.

5

The next tender episode of Don Juan, the rescue and adoption of Leila in the midst of the sack of Ismail, was suggested by a footnote in Byron's acknowledged source, Castelnau's Essai sur l'Histoire ancienne et moderne de la Nouvelle Russie.³⁵ The footnote is derived from the young Due de Richelieu's “mémoires,” one of Castelnau's sources, in which Richelieu describes his rescue of a young girl ten years old, innocent and lovely in striking contrast to the rage in her surroundings. She was trying to hide from a pair of menacing Kossacks among the slain bodies of four women, one of them her mother. Richelieu chased the Kossacks off with blows, and was glad to find that the little girl had no injury other than “a slight cut on the face from the same sword which had pierced her mother.”

Byron versified this incident, using almost the same words and faithfully detailing the facts. But his imagination, dwelling upon the future relations of Leila and Juan, seems to have reverted to one of Marmontel's Moral Tales, “Friendship Put to the Test,” in which a similar incident is described. This love story, again with orientalism and “noble savage” traits to recommend it, is enhanced by the themes of conflict between love and honor, of humanitarianism in war, and of universal religion as opposed to sectarianism. These qualities would all have made it appeal to Byron.

Blanford, the hero, is seeking his fortune in India and happens to be present when Coralie's native village is being sacked by the British soldiers. Her father is dealt a mortal blow on the threshold of his dwelling:

“At that instant Blanford arrives. He comes to repress the fury of the soldiery. … ‘Barbarians,’ said he to the soldiers, ‘be gone! Is it feebleness and innocence, old age and childhood, that you ought to attack?’”

Coralie, who is not yet fifteen years old, “witness to the piety, the sensibility of this stranger, thought she saw a god descended from Heaven to succour and comfort her father.” The old Brahmin, though he perceives his end approaching, devotes his dying moments to a prolonged discussion of virtue, war, and religion with Blanford. He confides Coralie to Blanford's charge, and Blanford swears “that her chastity, innocence, and liberty, shall be a deposit guarded by honour, and for ever inviolable,” and that she shall be brought up in “that modesty and virtue which are every where the glory of a woman”:

“Blanford, whom his duty recalled from Asia to Europe, carried thither with him his pupil; and though she was beautiful and easy to seduce; though he was young and strongly taken, he respected her innocence. During the voyage, he employed himself in teaching her a little English; in giving her an idea of the manners of Europe, and in disengaging her docile mind from the prejudices of her country. … The sentiments which he had conceived for his pupil seemed to have given him rather the disposition of a father than of a lover.”

The details of Marmontel's plot run far beyond the conceptions of Byron, insofar as they appear in his incompleted poem. But he has taken Marmontel's situation, authenticated by Richelieu's incident, and has reinterpreted it, with more delicacy and truth to life than Marmontel could muster. He rejects the improbable love at first sight of the young man for the child found in such frightful circumstances, and he refines on the strange mixed feelings each must feel for the other after the dramatic commencement of their affection. Moreover, he transfers to Leila some of the natural freshness of viewpoint to make satiric use of the observations of these travelers on European civilization.

A curious fact from Byron's life should be appended to this incident in Don Juan. Almost two years after the completion of Cantos VIII-XII, in which Leila figures, Byron secured the release of a group of Turkish civilian captives from the Greeks and sent them to their homes at his own expenses, all but one little girl, Hato, or Hatagee. Hato, Byron wrote to Augusta,³⁶

“has expressed a strong wish to remain with me, or under my care, and I have nearly determined to adopt her. If I thought that Lady B. would let her come to England as a Companion to Ada—(they are about the same age), and we could easily provide for her; if not, I can send her to Italy for education. She is very lively and quick, and with great black oriental eyes, and Asiatic features. All her brothers were killed in the Revolution. … Her extreme youth and sex have hitherto saved her life, but there is no saying what might occur in the course of the war (and of such a war), and I shall probably commit her to the charge of some English lady in the islands for the present. The Child herself has the same wish, and seems to have a decided character for her age. …”

Not content to leave the historical accuracy of this bit of Don Juan to the adventures of the Duc de Richelieu, Byron appears to be living out in his own life one of the adventures of his fictional hero. This is the exact reverse, in point of time-sequence, of the relation between the adventures of author and hero usually ascribed to Byron's storytelling. It is a measure of how deeply he could identify himself with his fictional creations.

6

The companionship of Leila on Juan's travels to seek his fortune in Russia and England may remind the reader of a similar situation toward the close of Thomas Hope's Anastasius. This novel, published anonymously by Murray in 1819, has been cited by Anton Pfeiffer³⁷ as the source of many incidents in Don Juan, Cantos III-X, and indeed deserves attention for its Byronism, which was immediately detected by the critics. Croker wrote to Murray:

“I have read just twenty pages of ‘Anastasius,’ and thank you for the information you gave me as to the author. Of course you know best, and what you volunteered to tell must be the truth, but then also I must believe in the ‘Metempsychosis,’ and that Tom Hope's late body is now the tabernacle of Lord Byron's soul.”³⁸

The Edinburgh Review, after the secret of the authorship of Anastasius was out, wrote enthusiastically:

“Mr. Hope will excuse us,—but we could not help exclaiming, in reading it, is this Mr. Thomas Hope?—Is this the man of chairs and tables—the gentleman of sphinxes—the Oedipus of coal-boxes—he who meditated upon muffineers and planned pokers?—Where has he hidden all this eloquence and poetry up to this hour?—How is it that he has, all of a sudden, burst out into descriptions which would not disgrace the pen of Tacitus—and displayed a depth of feeling, and a vigour of imagination, which Lord Byron could not excel?”³⁹

The novel is a most extraordinary work and is less well known today than it deserves to be, having been overshadowed perhaps by Morier's Hadji Baba.

Murray must have sent a copy of Anastasius to Byron in the spring of 1820, after he had settled down at Ravenna, but Byron does not mention it until July 22, 1820. Murray was curious to know what Byron thought of this new rival in orientalism, and Byron finally wrote that it was “good, but no more written by a Greek than by a Hebrew.” Murray was not satisfied with this lack of enthusiasm, and probably teased Byron further by letting him in on the secret of the authorship. In a later letter, Byron votes the book, rather petulantly, “excellent.” It is hard to avoid the impression that he was genuinely envious of Hope's production. Here was the man whom Byron had ridiculed in English Bards as a dilettante, turning out exactly the type of novel Byron could have wanted to do himself, and receiving praise for it in the Edinburgh with invidious comparison to his own powers. By 1823, Byron had sublimated these envious feelings in a joke. He told Countess Blessington, after expressing high commendation of Hope's Anastasius, that

“he wept bitterly over many pages of it, and for two reasons:—first, that he had not written it, and, secondly, that Hope had; for that it was necessary to like a man excessively to pardon his writing such a book—a book, as he said, excelling all recent productions, as much in wit and talent, as in true pathos. He added, that he would have given his two most approved poems, to have been the author of ‘Anastasius.’”⁴⁰

It seems unlikely that Byron had read this novel before he composed Cantos III-IV in Venice, September-October 1819. Consequently, it is hard to accept part of Pfeiffer's observations on Byron's alleged indebtedness to Hope. But there are some hints that Byron's may have followed for the later development of his poem. Anastasius, for example, dallies, for a page or so, with a project for a good adventure—to light out from Constantinople for St. Petersburg and become the next favorite of the Empress Catherine. Circumstances, however, direct him to the Arnaut-Turkish wars in the Balkans, then to Smyrna, the Arabian Desert, Egypt once more, and finally to Italy. In his second sojourn in Egypt, Anastasius falls in with Cirico, the wandering poet-revolutionist, whom he had already met after his disastrous love affair with Euphrosyne in Smyrna. Cirico always serves as a spur to his worthier ambitions, and urges him to try his fortunes in France in the French Revolution, where he might represent the cause of freedom for the Greeks. This hint may have reminded Byron of Anacharsis Cloots, for it was not until February 1821, some months after Byron had read Anastasius, that he first mentioned the plan of a French Revolutionary ending for Don Juan.

Anastasius is full of irony like Don Juan, but a dramatic irony expressed through the self-knowledge and self-characterization of the hero, who writes in the first person. He was born worldly-wise, with his impulses to mischief and wickedness infinitely stronger than his impulses to good feelings and good deeds. He says at one point that he feels impelled by destiny to “perform the things set down for him—be they good, or be they evil.” But in the context this confession of fatalism is ironic, and reminds us of that sudden frankness of Byron's:

“But Destiny and Passion spread the net
          (Fate is a good excuse for our own will). …”

Anastasius is master of his own soul, no matter how the wheel of fortune tosses him up and down. Periods of conversion and reformation occur from time to time, but not until his will, as well as his intellect, has been subdued by suffering does it finally turn toward good. This is the reverse of Don Juan's character, at least as far as we can see how it is to be projected. Both heroes, however, after living an extraordinarily active and congested life, were to die young in the odor of sanctity.

Many a thought of Anastasius in his roving career around the eastern Mediterranean parallels Byron's reflections in Don Juan: on the problems of free will, predestination, good and evil; on mutability in fortune; on avarice, the vice of the middle-aged; on female friendship and coquetry; on modern Greek patriotism and pride; on ennui—that it is a greater evil than loss or sorrow. Anastasius' reflections on his mother and her bad upbringing of him, when he came home to find her dead and only the dog to welcome him, must have struck Byron forcibly, and the conclusion, leaving Anastasius dying friendless and a solitary exile at the age of thirty-five, must have made an indelible impression on Byron's foreboding mind.

Coincidences also may be noted between the careers of Anastasius and Don Juan. Like Juan, Anastasius enters a new country, Arabia Deserta, famed for its liberty, and in the midst of uttering a rhapsody on freedom is held up by a fierce Bedouee, as the footpads hold up Juan with the words of praise to freedom-loving England scarcely out of his mouth. Like Juan, Anastasius leaves unwillingly the warm and familiar East for the chill and strangeness of the West, accompanied only by his child Alexis, the one being in the world whom he loves unselfishly:

“The people of Europe seemed heartless, the virtues of the Franks frigid, the very crimes of the West dull and prosaic; and I was like a plant which, reared in all the warmth of a hothouse, is going to be launched into … chilling blasts and nipping frosts. … Perhaps on the further borders of the chilly Neva, it may be my fate to cherish the last remembrance of Ionia and of Chios!”⁴¹

Anastasius' introduction into the society of Naples offers many parallels to Juan's experiences in England: intrigue in the haut monde, wits at the dinner table, the frenzies of romantic poets and blues, even a ghost which turns out to be substantial. M. de Silva, in a long diatribe against the corruptions of Rome, utters many of the thoughts Byron expresses in his castigation of England. Hope, like Byron, was using the observations of the traveler from another civilization to satirize his own.

While we are considering comparatively obscure works which have been nominated as sources of Byron's Don Juan, we should take a look at the Abate Casti's Tartar Poem,⁴² credited with having suggested the St. Petersburg episode. There is no direct evidence that Byron knew this ottava rima epic in twelve cantos; but it seems probable, in view of his enthusiasm for Casti's other poems and the general similarity between the adventures of Casti's hero and Don Juan, that Byron had read it. Ugo Foscolo's much admired article in the Quarterly Review, April 1819,⁴³ on the Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians, would have told him something about it. Foscolo wrote of Casti:

“After amusing himself with kings in comedy and heroes in tragedy, he renewed his satires upon royalty in the person of Catherine the Second; with whom he made free in a very long poem entitled Tartaro. Casti succeeded the Abbate Metastasio as Poeta Cesareo, and lived at Vienna in high favour with Joseph the Second, who used to set him on against the monks and friars. When the ‘Poema Tartaro’ appeared the Emperor Joseph was on very ill terms with the Empress Catherine; but when each had got a slice of the kingdom of Poland, they made up their differences. The Czarina insisted that the Poeta Cesareo should be turned away; and Casti was banished from Vienna: but the emperor directed that the poet's pension should continue payable during the remainder of his life. Casti, with a spirit which would have honoured a better man, refused the gift, and when Joseph remitted the money to him, he would not touch it. The pecuniary losses consequent upon the publication of the Tartaro were not made up in fame. Foreigners did not relish it, and the Italians did not understand it; for they knew nothing of the court of St. Petersburgh beyond what they read in the newspapers. Neither did it add much to Italian literature. The style is unimpassioned, and the diction without grace or purity. But the poem abounds with point, and it succeeded amongst certain readers, in the same way that small wits take in society. They amuse for a moment because they flatter the bad passions of the human heart, and they end by becoming tedious.”⁴⁴

The Poema Tartaro is supposed to be another chivalric epic of the middle ages. The imaginary hero, Tommaso Scardassale, a handsome blond young Irishman, sells all his goods and sets out on a Crusade with other cavaliers from all over Europe. They go to Constantinople to support Baldwin II, and thence to Palestine, where Tommaso is captured in a battle against the Sultan of Egypt. The Sultan sends him, among a dozen of the handsomest and youngest of the Christian captives, as a present to the Caliph of Bagdad. At Bagdad, he works as a gardener slave in the pleasure grounds of the seraglio, and thus sees and falls in love with Zelmira, a lady of the harem. The Caliph, however, finds Tommaso so agreeable, or so dangerous, that he decides to promote him to the office of chief eunuch in the seraglio; Tommaso is saved from the dreadful fate only by escaping with Zelmira and his faithful valet. They journey to Circassia, and there fall in with Battù Khan, a marshal of Tartary.

Thus far the first canto has been sprightly comic-epic, but from this point the tone of the poem changes. Tartary stands for Russia, where Casti spent some years as an ambassador at Catherine II's court, and all the great and near-great of St. Petersburg and the warlike events of the first years of her reign are described and satirized in the remaining cantos. The love interest of Zelmira is shelved, for she is given by Battù to his little companion Prince Mengo, and she does not turn up again until the end of Canto XII, when chance makes her and Mengo the new rulers of Russia. The intervening cantos are all concerned with the actual eighteenth century Russia, a combination of travelogue and political and religious satire.

Tommaso goes with Battù to Caracora (St. Petersburg); there he is introduced at court and shown the sights of the city by a young Greek, Siveno, a well-instructed blasé cynic, who enters the poem merely to be Tommaso's guide, and then leaves it for good. As Siveno has predicted, Tommaso is preferred by Battù to Potemkin, who looks him over (in the bath) as a candidate for the next “Gentleman of the week” for Catherine. Potemkin is delighted with him, and writes a note to Catherine, sending Tommaso off to deliver it to her. Catherine reads the note, which causes her to smile and laugh to herself, approaches Tommaso to inspect him better, and promptly turns him over to Turfana, her lady in charge of all such candidates, or “L'Eprouveuse,” as Byron calls her. The interview between Turfana and Tommaso is reported in full, and Tommaso is installed forthwith in Catherine's favor. Not until after all these preliminaries and the first weeks of Tommaso's servitude have passed, does the poet come to the great birthday ball, at which the public and the court first get a glimpse of the new favorite and whisper and speculate about him. Byron has telescoped all this dry, naked storytelling of Casti's to make one graceful, brilliant scene.

Tommaso is made of tougher material than Don Juan. Their predecessor Lanskoi, it is true, as Casti notes:

                    “Divenuto era smunto, e quasi tisico,
E i dover della carica annuale
                    Posto quasi l'avean di vita in risico,
Onde per lo consiglio universale,
                    D'ogni esperto Dottor, Medico fisico,
Andò a viaggiar negli stranieri stati,
E il numero aumentò de riformati.”

The same fate awaited Juan, but Tommaso, having no more sensibility, though a much more delicate looking frame, than any of Catherine's other aides-de-camp, flourished and outlived the wars and rebellions, and was finally disgraced only by the slander of Potemkin. From that point, Casti's poem leaves history and reverts to epic fancy.

Casti may have taught Byron, if he needed any instruction, to despise Catherine and all her works. He may have suggested to him the possibilities of double meanings and puns, even international ones, which are the only forms of humor in Casti's work, once it settles down to serious satire and description. Certain phrases and stanzas in Casti are echoed in Byron; for example:

“Candida verità, figlia del Cielo,
                    Oh! se vederti occhio mortal potesse
Senza ornamento alcun, senza alcun velo!
                    Oh! se scriver la storia ognun volesse
Al par di quei che scrissero il Vangelo,
                    Nè tanto il ben col mal si confondesse,
Oh! quanti, che di grandi il titol ebbero,
Piccoli agli occhi nostri apparirebbero!”

The reflections of Tommaso on his curious adventures, after he has become the Empress's favorite, would be congenial to Byron and his hero:

                                        “… guari non fu,
Che di Soria nel sanguinoso piano
          Caddi de' Saraceni in schiavitù;
E venni poi per vari casi in mano
          Di Melech, del Califfo, e di Battù;
Anzi, che Dio ne scampi insino un bruco,
Poco mancò che divenissi eunuco.
“E giunto poscia in sì lontan paesi
          Tosto la sorte mia cangiò di scena,
Ed a cotanta altezza a un tratto ascesi
          Che agli occhi miei creder lo posso appena;
Per quai sentier non preveduti, o intesi
          Il lor chieco destin gli uomini mena!
Commedia è il mondo, e l'uom dal caso pende
Chi sa qual fine la mia sorte attende!”

But the general intention and scope of Casti's poem are quite outside those of Byron's and fail to be realized with the success that attended Byron's efforts.

Notes

1. Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, with an English translation by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, London and New York, 1929.

2. [Hobhouse, John Cam. Recollections of a Long Life, 1909], II, 107.

3. Murray, Correspondence, II, 101.

4. Dunlop translates from Le Grand, I, 299.

5. Dunlop, History of Fiction, II, 75.

6. Trelawney, Recollections, 70.

7. Murray, Correspondence, II, 149-150.

8. I, 162-163.

9. L. & J., I, 253-254.

10. Works, II, 169.

11. L. & J., V, 544-545, & 551. Byron's arguments are negligible, for he constantly confuses his usage of the words “nature” and “art,” the opposing terms in the argument, as indeed they are the opposing forces in The Shipwreck—the power of the storm at sea pitted against the art of the ship and the mariners.

12. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, transl. by W. S. Rose, Canto XLI.

13. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Bk. V, ll. 222 ff., Loeb Classical Library translation. Other phrases, images, and ideas in Lucretius, too numerous to mention, which Byron made his own, include: “Alma Venus … genetrix” (“thou alone dost govern the nature of things, since without thee, nothing comes forth into the shining borders of light, nothing joyous and lovely is made. …”); Lucretius' description of the mind-soul, which Byron called “that very fiery particle”; and Byron's favorite tag: “medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid. …” Burton also loved to quote this aphorism, e.g. I, 144, of the Anatomy of Melancholy. Byron believed with Lucretius in the changing universe, but he rejected Lucretius' explanation of the process of death in the dissolution of soul and body. Cf. Don Juan, V, 33-39.

14. Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 272.

15. The Amadis of Greece, a continuation of Amadis de Gaul, is especially oriental; it contains a Christian-Moorish love affair, conducted by aid of female disguise, in the harem, similar to Florice and Blanchefleur and to Don Juan, Cantos V and VI. See Dunlop, I, 312-313.

16. Geneva, 1936, 220-224.

17. In Mélanges d'Histoire Littéraire … offerts à Fernand Baldensperger, I, Paris, 1930.

18. See Florice and Blanchefleur, ed. A. B. Taylor, Oxford, 1927, 16.

19. Dunlop, I, 253-267.

20. Ibid., 265.

21. L. & J., V, 171.

22. [Germaine] De Staël, De L'Allemagne, [3 vols., 1810] 269.

23. Oberon, Canto XI, 8, and following stanzas.

24. Ibid., XI, 47.

25. Besides, there was an interval of eighteen months between the composition of Canto V and Canto VI.

26. Leigh Hunt, reviewing Don Juan, III-V, in the Examiner, August 26, 1821, remarks that the love scene between Gulbeyaz and Juan is “an Oriental version of the scene between Lady Booby and her servant in Joseph Andrews.” Others have noticed its resemblance to the story of Potiphar's wife and Joseph.

27. Dunlop, II, 99.

28. As translated by Thomas Roscoe in The Italian Novelists, London, Simpkin and Marshall, 1836, II.

29. Reported in Dunlop, II, 292-293.

30. Don Juan, Canto V, was composed October 16 to November 20, 1820.

31. My translation.

32. July 1823, XIV, 88-92.

33. 30-31. My translation.

34. Cf. Murray, Correspondence, I, 16.

35. Paris, 1827, II, 216.

36. From Missolonghi, February 23, 1824, L. & J., VI, 331.

37. Thomas Hope's “Anastasius” und Lord Byrons “Don Juan,” Munich, 1913.

38. Smiles, II, 76.

39. No. LXIX, 92-102.

40. Blessington, Conversations, 36.

41. Anastasius, II, 356.

42. Composed in 1778, and published at Paris, 1797.

43. Quarterly Review, XXI.

44. P. 491.

Selected List of Works Consulted

Blessington, Marguerite Power, Countess of, Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1836.

Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord, The Works of Lord Byron, Poetry, edited by E. H. Coleridge, and Letters and Journals, edited by R. E. Prothero, London, John Murray, 1898-1905. 13 vols.

———, The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, with an introductory memoir by Sir Leslie Stephen, New York, Macmillan, 1907.

Dunlop, John, History of Fiction, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1842. 2 vols.

Hunt, Leigh, The Examiner, August 26, 1821, [Review of Don Juan, Cantos III-V].

Murray, John, editor, Lord Byron's Correspondence, London, John Murray, 1922. 2 vols.

Trelawney, Edward, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, with an introduction by Edward Dowden, London, Humphrey Milford, 1923.