1

Byron was indebted to literature not only for suggestions which enriched the situations, the sentiments, and the characterizations of Don Juan, but for the cultivation of many of his ideas. Ideas came to him, he freely acknowledged, as much from his reading as from his own observation of life, and these developed into convictions when he had tested them by experience and introspection.

The literary filiation of his ideas about war in Don Juan clearly demonstrates this alliance between literature and life. Omitting Shakespeare, though it should be noted that Henry IV and Hamlet were among Byron's favorite sources of quotation, we can begin with Burton, whose introduction to the Anatomy of Melancholy gives faithful expression in almost all its pages to Byron's inmost beliefs.

The stuff of the English Democritus' ideas is, however, as old as Lucian's Menippus and Juvenal's Tenth Satire, which were also direct sources of inspiration to Byron. Menippus descends to Hades to ask blind Teiresias what is the best way of life. He learns, like Hamlet, that the dead are indistinguishable from one another:

“So, with many skeletons lying together, all alike staring horridly and vacuously and baring their teeth, I questioned myself how I could distinguish Thersites from handsome Niraus, or the mendicant Irus from the king of the Phaeacians, or the cook Pyrrhias from Agamemnon.”

Teiresias answers Menippus' question:

“The life of the common sort is best, and you will act more wisely if you stop speculating about heavenly bodies and discussing final causes and first causes, spit your scorn at those clever syllogisms, and counting all that sort of thing nonsense, make it always your sole object to put the present to good use and to hasten on your way, laughing a great deal and taking nothing seriously.”¹

Byron concludes the stanzas on Death at the beginning of Don Juan, Canto IX, bridging the transition from Camp to Court:

“And thus Death laughs,—it is sad merriment,
          But still it is so; and with such example
Why should not Life be equally content
          With his Superior, in a smile to trample
Upon the nothings which are daily spent
                    Like bubbles on an Ocean much less ample
Than the Eternal Deluge, which devours
Suns as rays—worlds like atoms—years like hours?”

His thoughts wander on through the natural associations of this Lucianic (and Lucretian) passage, to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Alexander's fame, Burton's object in life (good health and a sound digestion), the problem of being, Montaigne's skepticism, and Newton's intellectual modesty.

“It is a pleasant voyage perhaps to float,
                    Like Pyrrho, on a sea of speculation;
But …
                                        … a calm and shallow station
Well night the shore, where one stoops down and
          gathers
Some pretty shell, is best for moderate bathers.”

But skepticism for Byron, as for Burton, was only the cause for all the greater moral indignation at the crimes and follies of human beings. “Lykanthropy,” Byron goes on, he comprehends, but he cannot for the life of him imagine why men accuse him of misanthropy, when all he writes is to show men the truth about mankind.²

Burton's thought on this Lucianic basis includes in the wonderful proliferations of “Democritus to his reader” a long diatribe against wars of conquest, chief among the vain follies of humanity:

“What would [Democritus] have said to see, hear, and read so many bloody battles, so many thousands slain at once, such streams of blood able to turn mills, unius ob noxam furiasque (through the mad guilt of one person), or to make sport for princes, without any just cause, ‘for vain titles’ (saith Austin), ‘precedency, some wench, or such-like toy, or out of desire of domineering, vainglory, malice, revenge, folly, madness,’ goodly causes all, ob quas universus orbis bellis et caedibus misceatur (for plunging the whole world into an orgy of war and slaughter), whilst statesmen themselves in the meantime are secure at home, pampered with all delights and pleasures, take their ease, and follow their lusts, not considering what intolerable misery poor soldiers endure, their often wounds, hunger, thirst, etc., the lamentable cares, torments, calamities, and oppressions that accompany such proceedings, they feel not, take no notice of it. ‘So wars are begun, by the persuasion of a few deboshed, hair-brain, poor, dissolute, hungry captains, parasitical fawners, unquiet Hotspurs, restless innovators, green heads, to satisfy one man's private spleen, lust, ambition, avarice, etc.’; tales rapiunt scelerata in proelia causae (such causes bring on war with all its crimes). Flos hominum (the flower of mankind), proper men, well proportioned, carefully brought up, able both in body and mind, sound, led like so many beasts to the slaughter in the flower of their years, pride, and full strength, without all remorse and pity, sacrificed to Pluto, killed up as so many sheep, for devils' food, 40,000 at once.”³

Burton continues, enumerating famous sieges and slaughters, the “engines, fireworks, and whatsoever the devil could invent to do mischief with 2,500,000 iron bullets shot of 40 pound weight, three or four millions of gold consumed.” How may Nature, God, and all good men expostulate at this perversion of “an harmless, quiet, a divine creature! … yet … these are the brave spirits, the gallants of the world, these admired alone, triumph alone, have statues, crowns, pyramids, obelisks to their eternal fame. …” Burton dilates in a crescendo of rage on the slaughters, treachery, waste, rapine, maiming, murder, and rape of war: “So abominable a thing is war … the scourge of God, cause, effect, fruit, and punishment of sin, and not … the mere pruning of the human race, as Tertullian calls it, but ruina. …” Civil wars are particularly “feral”—“ten thousand families rooted out. … ‘Why do the Gentiles so furiously rage?’ saith the Prophet David. … But we may ask, why do the Christians so furiously rage? … Would this, think you, have enforced our Democritus to laughter, or rather made him turn his tune … and weep with Heraclitus. …”

But this is not all, nor even the worst, says Burton. For though “valor is much to be commended in a wise man,” the world mistakes for the most part:

“They term theft, murder, and rapine, virtue. … ‘They commonly call the most hair-brain bloodsuckers, strongest thieves, the most desperate villains, treacherous rogues, inhuman murderers … valiant and renowned soldiers, possessed with a brute persuasion of false honour,’ as Pontus Heuter in his Burgundian History complains. By means of which it comes to pass that daily so many voluntaries offer themselves, leaving their sweet wives, children, friends, for sixpence (if they can get it) a day … to get a name of valour, honour and applause, which lasts not neither, for it is but a mere flash this fame, and like a rose … 't is gone in an instant. Of fifteen thousand proletaries slain in a battle, scarce fifteen are recorded in history, or one alone, the general perhaps, and after a while his and their names are likewise blotted out, the whole battle itself is forgotten. … Which is yet more to be lamented, [the orators] persuade them this hellish course of life is holy, they promise heaven to such as venture their lives … in a sacred war.”

“Such brutish stories” that “put a note of divinity upon the most cruel and pernicious plague of humankind,” should be suppressed. Meanwhile,

“… a poor sheep-stealer is hanged for stealing of victuals, … but a great man in office may securely rob whole provinces, undo thousands, pill and poll, … enrich himself by spoils of the commons, be uncontrollable in his actions, and after all, be recompensed with turgent titles, honoured for his good service, and no man dare find fault, or mutter at it.”

The reader will recognize in this outburst the source of many and many a passage in English poetry and prose which borrowed freely not only the ideas but even the words of Burton's most eloquent oration, as Burton had freely gathered and brought up to date the Juvenalian eloquence of centuries on this subject. A set piece on the madness of conquerors and the outrage of war became a classic necessity in eighteenth century verse. Combined with reflections on the careers of Louis XIV, Charles XII, and Frederick the Great, these set pieces in sermons, periodicals, and poems began to be associated with the problem of Greatness and Goodness, as well as with the mockery of fame.⁴ Byron's Don Juan, Cantos VII-VIII, was heir to all of these, but let us single out those passages that we know Byron had most in mind in 1821, as he was meditating the future of his suspended poem.

Pope, always fresh in his recollection, was particularly so in the early weeks of 1821, while he was writing his pamphlets in the Bowles controversy. He had been rereading Pope in Campbell's Specimens, and no doubt continuing his reflections on the worth of “the little Queen Anne's man” as opposed to contemporary poets. In March 1821 he wrote Murray a letter in which he comments in detail on Pope's superior imagery and imagination in satire. It is not surprising to find how deeply Pope's lines in The Essay on Man, Epistle IV, had been absorbed by Byron:

“Look next on Greatness: say where Greatness lies.
‘Where but among the heroes and the wise?’
Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,
From Macedonia's madman to the Swede;
The whole strange purpose of their lives to find,
Or make, an enemy of all mankind!
Not one looks backward, onward still he goes,
Yet ne'er looks further forward than his nose. …
What's fame? a fancied life in others' breath;
A thing beyond us, ev'n before our death. …
All that we feel of it begins and ends
In the small circle of our foes or friends;
To all beside as much an empty shade,
An Eugene living as a Caesar dead; …
One self-approving hour whole years out-weighs
Of stupid starers and of loud huzzas.”(5)

At the same time, Byron was studying carefully Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, as he records in his Journal, January 9, 1821:

“Read Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes,—all the examples and mode of giving them sublime, as well as the latter part, with the exception of an occasional couplet. … 'Tis a grand poem—and so true!—true as the 10th of Juvenal himself. The lapse of ages changes all things—time—language—the earth—the bounds of the sea—the stars of the sky, and every thing ‘about, around, and underneath’ man, except man himself, who has always been, and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment. All the discoveries which have yet been made have multiplied little but existence. An extirpated disease is succeeded by some new pestilence; and a discovered world has brought little to the old one. …”⁶

Byron is reading with application of Johnson's lines to modern life.

The introduction of the Vanity of Human Wishes leads at once to war, the prime example of folly in human ambitions. We are told to observe

“How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress'd,
When vengeance listens to the fool's request. …
Impeachment stops the speaker's pow'rful breath,
And restless fire precipitates on death.
          But scarce observ'd, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the gen'ral massacre of gold;
Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfin'd,
And crouds with crimes the records of mankind. …
Once more, Democritus, arise on earth,
With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth,
See motley life in modern trappings dress'd,
And feed with various fools th' eternal jest. …”

Byron had recently commented to Murray, when he heard of the death of his dentist Waite, on his abomination of Wellington and all such “‘bloody, blustering boobies’ who gain a name by breaking heads and knocking out grinders.” Johnson's pictures of Charles XII, Xerxes, and “the bold Bavarian, in a luckless hour” furnished his thoughts with ammunition for the Siege of Ismail.

With the invocation to Democritus to rise once more, Johnson's poem would further have reminded Byron of Burton, for though it is a free imitation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire, it draws upon the Anatomy of Melancholy even for subject matter, notably in the passage on the woes of scholars.⁷ Byron sent off to Murray for a copy of that well-remembered book, and had the luck to get back several months later his own former copy, rescued from the sale.

Meanwhile Byron had been writing Sardanapalus, “which he had for some time meditated,” basing it on Diodorus Siculus and Mitford's Greece, though he had known the story since his school-days. While he worked in that tragedy on the problems of luxury and courage, tyranny and revolution, he had to deal in real life with the plans for an Italian revolution against the Austrians. On the day he commenced Sardanapalus, he notes in his Journal that news has come:

“the Powers mean to war with the peoples. The intelligence seems positive—let it be so—they will be beaten in the end. The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.”⁸

From the luxury-loving warrior-prince, and the causes of freedom and justice, he turned to Cain; in that, he enlarged the perspective on the problems of good and evil, murder and revolution, from the historical to the cosmic, under the influence of his interest in metaphysics, popular geology, and astronomy. Compare the passages in Don Juan, especially Canto IX, 37-40, where war is viewed in a geological and archaeological vista. Meanwhile, also, he had been reading Shelley's Revolt of Islam, an effort, unsuccessful Byron felt, inspired by the French Revolution, to condemn tyrants and war and to praise freedom and brotherhood.

In the autumn of 1821, Byron was rereading Fielding. Judging from the references in his letters on the way to Pisa, he ran through not only Joseph Andrews, but the Miscellanies, and he noted his reflections in his Detached Thoughts, early in November:

“They talk of Radicalism, Jacobinism, etc., in England (I am told), but they should turn over the pages of ‘Jonathan Wild the Great.’ The inequality of conditions, and the littleness of the great, were never set forth in stronger terms; and his contempt for Conquerors and the like is such, that, had he lived now, he would have been denounced in ‘the Courier’ as the grand Mouthpiece and Factionary of the revolutionists. And yet I never recollect to have heard this turn of Fielding's mind noticed, though it is obvious in every page.”⁹

The influence of Lucian, Juvenal, Burton, and Pope on Fielding's mind is also obvious in the various pieces comprised in the Miscellanies. The thread of meditation on war and conquest, greatness and fame runs through many of them. The Essay of True Greatness contains a typical set piece on war. It is almost a miniature, a text, of Byron's Siege of Ismail. Men, Fielding says, refuse honor to the lean wolf for his conquests over the flocks, though famine is his motive,

“While Man, not drove by Hunger from his Den,
To Honour climbs o'er Heaps of murder'd Men.
Shall ravag'd Fields, and burning Towns proclaim
The Hero's Glory, not the Robber's Shame?
Shall Thousands fall, and Millions be undone
To glut the hungry Cruelty of one?
          “Behold the Plain with human Gore grow red,
The swelling River heave along the Dead.
See, through the Breach the hostile Deluge flow,
Along it bears the unresisting Foe:
Hear, in each Street the wretched Virgin's Cries,
Her Lover sees her ravish'd as he dies.
The Infant wonders at its Mother's Tears,
And smiling feels its Fate before its Fears.
Age, while in vain for the first Blow it calls,
Views all its Branches lopp'd before it falls.
Beauty betrays the Mistress it should guard,
And, faithless, proves the Ravisher's Reward:
Death, their sole Friend, relieves them from their Ills,
The kindest Victor he, who soonest kills.
          “Could such Exploits as these thy Pride create?
Could these, O Philip's Son, proclaim thee great? …
Not on such Wings, to Fame did Churchill soar,
For Europe while defensive Arms he bore.
Whose Conquests, cheap at all the Blood they cost,
Sav'd Millions by each noble Life they lost. …
Thee, from the lowest Depth of Time, on high
Blazing, shall late Posterity descry;
And own the Purchase of thy glorious Pains,
While Liberty, or while her Name remains.”

Fielding's imitations of Lucian's Dialogues contains a noteworthy one between Alexander and Diogenes. Alexander has been preening himself on his conquests and slaughters, and Diogenes retorts that Alexander is no better than any deadly pestilence, whom men fear equally as a source of death:

“Alexander: Thou seemest, to my Apprehension, to be ignorant, that in professing this Disregard for the Glory I have so painfully achieved, thou art undermining the Foundation of all that Honour, which is the Encouragement to, and Reward of, every thing truly great and noble: For in what doth all Honour, Glory, and Fame consist, but in the Breath of that Multitude, whose Estimation with such ill-grounded Scorn thou dost affect to despise. … What other Reward than this have all those Heroes proposed to themselves, who rejecting the Enjoyments which Ease, Riches, Pleasure, and Power, have held forth to them in their native Country, have deserted their Homes, and all those Things which to vulgar Mortals appear lovely or desirable, and in Defiance of Difficulty and Danger, invaded and spoiled the Cities and Territories of others; when their Anger hath been provoked by no Injury, nor their Hope inspired by the Prospect of any other Good than of this very Glory and Honour, this Adoration of Slaves. …”

Diogenes retorts that Alexander does not know the meaning of true Honour if indeed he finds it in the applause of Wretches, the Mob, who are truly contemptible; Honour is actually self-approval for one's own Wisdom and Virtue. Alexander asks him what his Wisdom and Virtue consist in:

DIOGENES:
Not in ravaging Countries, burning Cities, plundering and massacring Mankind.
ALEXANDER:
No, rather in biting and snarling at them.

Byron doubtless noted the Lucianic irony and surprise ending.

The classic passages in Jonathan Wild are so well-known as hardly to require quotation. They occur passim in Jonathan's reflections on Greatness and his career. He early decides that the Great Man is he who hires the most hands to perform his will, whether Conquerors, absolute Princes, Prime Ministers, or Prigs. Goodness, on the other hand, is only the expression of pusillanimity and soft-wittedness. As for murder, Jonathan soliloquizes:

“What is the Life of a single Man? Have not whole Armies and Nations been sacrificed to the Humour of One Great Man? Nay, to omit that first Class of Greatness, the Conquerors of Mankind, how often have Numbers fallen by a fictitious Plot, only to satisfy the Spleen, or perhaps exercise the Ingenuity of a Member of that second order of Greatness the Ministerial!”

In the grand climax, Fielding declares that Wild's career exceeds in Greatness even those of some few Heroes, such as traitors, or Conquerors, “who have impoverished, pillaged, sacked, burnt, and destroyed the Countries and Cities of their fellow Creatures, from no other Provocation than that of Glory.”

The same motifs are repeated in A Journey from this World to the Next, and in the jeu d'esprit, An Essay on Nothing, where to the nothingness of the ambition of conquerors and emperors is joined the nothingness of the ambition of the Miser, unless “he can shew us some substantial Good which this Fortune is to produce,”—a sequence followed likewise by Juvenal, Burton, and Byron.

Pope, Johnson, Fielding, and Burton occupied a prominent place in Byron's thoughts during 1821, but they would draw in their train a host of reminiscences of other writers. I could repeat many instances, as Burton would say—Smollett, for example, Swift, and Steele. But turning to Voltaire, who shared with Pope the most important place in Byron's models, we find the same condemnation of wars of conquest. Although Voltaire cannot help admiring the fortitude and daring of Charles “the Great,” in his biography of the Swedish conqueror, he condemns severely Charles's wars of conquest, which laid waste the overrun territories and reduced the conqueror's own country in men and money to the point of perishing. He concludes that Charles XII was not at all a great man, especially in comparison with his lifelong enemy, Peter the Great; for though Peter was equally cruel and aggressive, he is exempt from the charge of wanton highway robbery by the fact that his wars always enriched his country in material wealth and culture. Byron's interest in this biography is marked by his drawing upon it for the setting and story of Mazeppa, the famous Polish-Cossack ally of Charles XII.

In his tales, Voltaire elevates his moralizing on war to a philosophical level, in his search for the answer to the problem of the existence of evil and misery. In Babouc's Vision, the World as it is, the first spectacle that Babouc sees upon entering Persia is a senseless war between the Persians and the Indians over a trifling cause—a war in which brutality and treachery abound, while the individual soldiers on both sides fight heroically with no notion of their cause. Babouc interviewed the commanders in either army, and

“learned of actions of generosity, greatness of soul, humanity, which astounded and delighted him.

“‘Inexplicable human beings!’ cried he. ‘How can you unite so much baseness and grandeur, so many virtues and crimes?’

“Meanwhile peace was declared. The leaders of the two armies, neither of whom had gained the victory but on the contrary had shed the blood of so many men for their own interests, went off to seek rewards in their own Courts. The peace was praised in the public prints which announced nothing less than the return of virtue and felicity to the earth.”

Babouc observes the same duality, the same mixture of good and evil, in all the institutions and customs of Persepolis, and concludes that “if all is not well, all is tolerable.”

In Candide, however, the first overwhelming misfortune of the hero is caused by the carnage and rapine of war, which is recounted in a spirit of utter revolt against its brutality. The fantasy, grotesque emphasis, and exaggeration of this counterblast against false optimism would not appeal to Byron's sense of proportion and of fact, but he thoroughly agreed with the conclusion: “that man was born to live in the convulsions of distress or in the lethargy of boredom,” and that the only solution to render life even tolerable is to work without argument or curiosity about problems beyond man's solving—to “cultivate his garden.”

All these views of the problem of war have been largely from the moral and philosophical standpoint, but on the economic side of the question, Byron certainly knew the calm commercialism of the Whig viewpoint on the extravagance of conquest.¹⁰ He probably also sympathized with Italian antimilitaristic propaganda, such as that expressed in Goldoni's comedy La Guerra. He must certainly have been acquainted with the most famous antimilitaristic statement of his own day, Benjamin Constant's pamphlet entitled de l'Esprit de Conquête et de l'Usurpation.¹¹ Even if he had never read Constant's political works, he would have known the general tenor of his ideas from Madame de Staël and her friends in London, and again at Coppet in 1816, where Constant was a frequent topic of conversation.

The phrasing of de l'Esprit de Conquête makes it seem uncannily appropriate for our contemporary world, and underlines the resemblance of our times to the Napoleonic. It does not dwell on the horrors of war, but reasons on the impossibility of accomplishing any good by a war of conquest in the modern commercial world. It looks forward to the united nations and to the outlawing of war. But, most important for Byron, it dwells upon the hypocrisy incidental to war. When a nation sets out on a war of conquest, Constant says, it throws itself backward to a state of barbarous tyranny complicated by a disgusting hypocrisy:

“Authority has then to accomplish, in the intellectual faculties of the mass of its subjects, the same effect as in the moral qualities of the military. It must exert itself to banish all logic from the mind of the one, while it tries to stifle all humanity in the heart of the other: all words lose their sense; that of moderation must presage violence; that of justice must announce inequity. The right of nations must become a code of expropriation and of barbarism: every civilized notion which the light of centuries has introduced into the relations of societies, as into those of individuals, must be suppressed anew. The human race must revert to those times of devastation which seem to us the opprobrium of history. Hypocrisy alone must accomplish this difference; and that hypocrisy must be more corrupting than anyone can imagine; for the lies of authority are evil not only when they lead astray and deceive the people: they are all the more so when they do not deceive them.”¹²

With all these thoughts in mind, Byron set out deliberately to write an anti-Iliad, and cast about for an historical source, which he found in the Marquis Gabriel de Castelnau's Essai sur l'Histoire Ancienne et Moderne de la Nouvelle Russie, Paris, 3 vols., 1820. Castelnau gives a rapid, detailed story of the Siege of Ismail, with all the facts as Byron uses them and in almost the same words. E. H. Coleridge, in his edition of Don Juan, has collated the parallel passages, but Coleridge's quotations do not show the general drift of Castelnau's narrative, which reveals its ideal appropriateness as a vehicle for Byron's satire. In the first place, it is an eyewitness account, compounded from a report of the siege made by a Russian officer who fought at it, from the journal of the young Duc de Richelieu, and from letters of the generals and Potemkin, which Castelnau claims to have in his hands. These ensure its authenticity, and set it in opposition to all the poetic accounts of sieges, dear to epic, from Homer and Tasso to Voltaire's Henriade. In the second place, Castelnau pretends to be writing a new sort of history—a kind that Byron approved—that not only exhibits the manners of a nation but includes those details of which historians are often so blamably negligent. Commenting on the foolhardy courage of the Russians under Suvaroff in attempting the assault of Ismail when their numbers were inferior to the Turks, Castelnau writes:

“Without that disposition [to obtain glory and honor at any cost], without the success which surmounted dangers easy to conceive, we would certainly not have entered into details at such length; but this assault of Ismail is an event to be noted among the most gallant of its kind; it gives an exact idea of the nation which undertook it, of the general who commanded it, and it honors all the military who took part in it. That the historian should slide over facts with little notice, that he should content himself with indicating and not bearing down upon them, is so many lines the less which he often spares the ennui of those who read; but that he should render an exact account of an action allied to heroism is a duty which he ought to force himself to fulfill well.”¹³

Castelnau relishes the heroism and the action, for to him war is glorious. He mentions the generals and the men of rank personally and recounts laconically the suffering of the soldiers as part of the tactics of the battle. But the memoirs which he quotes are not so indifferent to the horrors of carnage and pillage, and Castelnau does not attempt to reconcile the marked difference between their eyewitness viewpoint and his own academic attitude. Two paragraphs forming a brief word picture of the sack of Ismail end thus:

“Let us turn our regard from the frightful spectacle of which we have only given an idea; let us pass over in silence acts of ferocity worse than death; let us draw the curtain on the disgusting excesses and the crimes impossible to prevent when the fury of the soldiers could not be restrained.”

He goes on, in apology for the carnage, to say that it had nothing to do with the kindly nature of the Russians; it was the inevitable expression of their rage at the losses and resistance sustained in taking the city. On the whole, says Castelnau, the Siege of Ismail is unique in showing the exploit of 23,000 men (of whom over 8,000 were killed) against 36,000 in a fortified place (over 38,000 Turks were killed, counting civilians), and offers “to Europe the most handsome military deed which its annals could celebrate.” This was an invitation to irony which Byron could not resist.

The main purpose of Don Juan, Cantos VII-VIII, is therefore a satiric attack upon wars of conquest, the major crime of civilization. On the other hand, the Siege of Ismail is only an episode in the experiences of Don Juan. Byron shows in these cantos what he had learned from the novels of Scott in the conduct of historical fiction. Without losing sight of the fortunes and characterization of his fictional hero, he manages to blend them into the historical narrative—the epic sweep of the siege and the sack, the portrait of Suvaroff, and the sketches of the other historical characters. Like Scott, he heightens, expands, and realizes in detail all the data in the source narrative.

In these efforts of imagination, he was inspired not only by the novel but by the epic. We have already mentioned the episode of Leila's rescue with its echo of Marmontel's novel. Even more strikingly, the episode of the Tartar Khan and his five sons, who sold their lives so dearly, reflects epic inspiration. Castelnau relates the story briefly with no elaboration, but Byron's expanded version of it recalls, not only his own earlier attempt at the same scene in Minotti's fight, as he “so gallantly bore the brunt of the fray,”¹⁴ but the episode of Latinus and his five sons in Tasso's Siege of Jerusalem.¹⁵ Ginguené in his account of the episodes and characters chosen by Tasso to illustrate the two camps, Moslem and Christian, singles out this one of Latinus and his sons to narrate in full.¹⁶ Thus Byron had recently been reminded of that heroic story. Like Latinus, Byron's old Khan sees his sons perish one after the other and feels himself at last childless and alone; with a final desperate spring upon his enemies, he catches his death blow and

“In one wide wound poured forth his soul at once.”

Tasso's passage ends in a simile likening the fall of Latinus to that of a sturdy tree, and Byron echoes this figure in Canto VIII, 116. The coincidence of such passages in Castelnau and Tasso (compare also Byron's chief Pasha, who surrendered at last with oriental phlegm, and Tasso's wily Soldan of Jerusalem) would draw a cloud of epic reminiscences and enhance the value of Byron's Siege of Ismail to his readers. For the mingling of the heroic deeds of individuals with the barbaric ferocity of the whole siege is part of the epic satire on unnatural civilization.

2

The last six cantos of Don Juan, the English section, were less directly influenced by literature than the first ten. Although the circumstances of plot and characters are thoroughly fictionalized, the thoughts, the feelings, and the situations were largely Byron's at firsthand. Nevertheless, there are some interesting correspondences to be traced in his reading, which help to locate Don Juan XI-XVI in its proper literary setting.

In the first place, memoirs contributed to the pattern and the spirit of these cantos. The fine lines that separate the novel from biography and biography from memoirs are perhaps hard to define. All three were favorite types of reading with Byron. But the principal virtue of memoirs is that they describe beneath an infinity of ephemeral details, not individuals, but a real society and the spirit and ideals that actuate it. De Grammont's memoirs, for instance, convey the gaiety, essential health, and rude vivacity of the English court of Charles II. Grimm's expose the intellectuality, the sentimentality, and the decay and new life fermenting together in pre-Revolutionary France. The anecdotes, the portraits, the events recorded combine to impart to the reader the essential atmosphere in a given society at a given time.

Byron was keenly aware of this function of memoir writing. He wrote to the Earl of Blessington:

“I return the Count D'Orsay's Journal, which is a very extraordinary production, and of a most melancholy truth in all that regards high life in England. … The most singular thing is, how he should have penetrated not the fact, but the mystery of the English ennui at two-and-twenty. I was about the same age when I made the same discovery, in almost precisely the same circles,—(for there is scarcely a person mentioned whom I did not see nightly or daily, and was acquainted more or less intimately with most of them,)—but I never could have described it so well. Il faut être Français, to effect this.

“But he ought also to have been in the country during the hunting season, with ‘a select party of distinguished guests,’ as the papers term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the hunting days), and the soiree ensuing thereupon,—and the women looking as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect at Lord Cowper's—small, but select, and composed of the most amusing people. The dessert was hardly on the table, when, out of twelve, I counted five asleep. …

“Altogether, your friend's Journal is a very formidable production. … I have read the whole with great attention and instruction. … I showed it … to a young Italian lady of rank, … and she was delighted with it, and says that she has derived a better notion of English society from it than from all Madame de Staël's metaphysical disputations on the same subject, in her work on the Revolution.”¹⁷

The diversity of subjects and pictures in the latter cantos of Don Juan, informed as they are with satiric purpose, has in a broader sense an affinity with memoir writing. It is Byron's attempt to sum up a real society, at the same time that he is satirizing it and writing a novel based on its realities.

A brief little volume of Essays and Sketches … by a Gentleman who has left his Lodgings, the anonymous production of Moore's friend, Lord John Russell, may have contributed some specific suggestions. Byron told Lady Blessington that he had been reading and enjoying them; they were excellent in detail, he thought, but on too small a scale. These papers contain sprightly descriptions of the London social season. Two long paragraphs describing a London Ball—the crush, the inability to meet one's friends, the hostess ready to sink with fatigue—closely parallel the stanzas in Don Juan, XI, 67-72. There is an essay on fortune-hunting mammas who entrap young heirs into marrying their daughters, “making society a cattle fair,” a practice which “produces in the end deceit amongst girls, and suspicion in young men.” Compare Don Juan, XII, 58-61. Other chapters comment on the corrupt practices of political career men, and the arithmetical legerdemain of the Chancellors of the Exchequer. But these were commonplaces of the contemporary novel and journalism.

The topics for discussion in periodicals, indeed, are a rich source for many of the digressions and allusions in Beppo and Don Juan. A perusal of the Quarterly List of New Publications in the Edinburgh Review, for instance, the issue of January 1820, suggests that here are the points of departure for many of Byron's ramblings on contemporary subjects: medicine, political economy, subjects under debate in Parliament and in religious synods, Ireland, slavery, post roads, travels to the North Pole in search of a northwest passage, descriptions of country seats, indicating the revival of interest in Gothic architecture, and gay reviews of recent books on French cookery and the science of the gourmet. Journals of the Edinburgh Review type are, in fact, a kind of public memoirs. It is a measure of the sureness of Byron's taste, the integrity of his mind, that the journalistic topics of his poem require as little footnoting as they do, and seem fresh and interesting after the lapse of more than a hundred years.

The subject of the marriage market, important in English fiction since the days of Fanny Burney and greatly to be expanded by Victorian novelists, has, like the indictment of war, a Juvenalian background. Fielding touched on its main themes in his epistle To a Friend on the Choice of a Wife, reflecting to some extent the ideas of the sixth satire of Juvenal, which he translated later in the same volume of the Miscellanies:

          “Some sterner Foes to Marriage bold aver,
That in this Choice a Man must surely err:
Nor can I to this Lottery advise,
A thousand Blanks appearing to a Prize.
Women by Nature form'd too prone to Ill,
By Education are made proner still,
To cheat, deceive, conceal each genuine Thought,
By Mothers, and by Mistresses are taught.
The Face and Shape are first the Mother's Care;
The Dancing-Master next improves the Air.
To these Perfections add a Voice most sweet;
The skill'd Musician makes the Nymph compleat.
          “Thus with a Person well equipp'd, her Mind
Left, as when first created, rude and blind,
She's sent to make her Conquests on Mankind.
But first inform'd the studied Glance to aim,
Where Riches shew the profitable Game:
How with unequal Smiles the Jest to take,
When Princes, Lords, or Squires, or Captains speak;
These Lovers careful shun, and those create;
And Merit only see in an Estate.”

Fanny Burney, representative of a host of women novelists in her time, elaborated these themes, illustrating them from the actualities of daily practice, and clustering around them subordinate themes on all the other malpractices of fashionable life. The fashionable, or “silver fork,” novels were well known to Byron; they must have constituted a large portion of those “four thousand novels” he claims to have read before 1807. In Don Juan XI-XVI, he drew heavily upon their types and themes: the knowing duenna, the marriageable bachelor, the “drapery-misses,” the blues, the desperate dandies, the complacent husbands, the matchmaking relatives, the dissatisfied wives.

The Gothic novel, however, comes in for a greater share of burlesquing attention. The description of Norman Abbey, fond though it is, is nevertheless with its details of architecture, grounds, and furnishings, a hit at Gothic novel descriptions, even at the novels of Scott. Byron concludes it:

“Oh, reader! if that thou canst read,—and know
                    'T is not enough to spell, or even to read,
To constitute a reader—there must go
                    Virtues of which both you and I have need;—
Firstly, begin with the beginning—(though
                    That clause is hard); and secondly, proceed:
Thirdly, commence not with the end—or sinning
In this sort, end at last with the beginning.
“But, reader, thou hast patient been of late,
                    While I, without remorse of rhyme, or fear,
Have built and laid out ground at such a rate,
                    Dan Phoebus takes me for an auctioneer.
That Poets were so from their earliest date,
                    By Homer's ‘Catalogue of ships’ is clear;
But a mere modern must be moderate—
I spare you then the furniture and plate.”

Incidentally, the four stanzas following the description of Newstead with its gently humorous close, form a delightful burlesque of “nature-poetry” like Keats's Ode to Autumn.

The principal resemblance between Don Juan and the Gothic novel is, of course, the ghost scenes in the sixteenth canto. To celebrate his twenty-first birthday, Byron gave a house party at Newstead for several of his college friends. One of the pranks that contributed to their merriment was a bit of ghostly faking that Hobhouse recalled years later in his journal:

“On Tuesday, I set off for Nottingham, and passed by Newstead. … When I was admitted I was shown up into the old gallery, then refitted, and scarcely to be recognised. It was there that Lord Byron placed the old stone coffin found in the cloisters; and I well recollected that, passing through the gloomy length of it late one night, I heard a groan proceeding from the spot. I went to the coffin, and a figure rose from it, dressed in a cloak and cowl, and blew out my candle. … It was my friend C. S. Matthews.”¹⁸

From this incident, the local legends, the atmosphere of the dilapidated old Abbey, and Byron's bump of superstition, grew not only Don Juan's vision of the Black Friar, but the earlier ghostly vision in Lara. A comparison of these two episodes shows the essential differences between Byron's romantic and his realistic, satiric muses, both under the influence of Gothic novel fashions.

The scene and the circumstances in both poems are identical, but in Lara, the details emphasized in evoking a ghostly atmosphere are feverishly heightened and vaguely localized, while in Don Juan, they are sharply and matter-of-factly defined. Lara and Juan both turn from a contemplation of the moonlight, the lake, and the stream, to walk in the shadowy gallery, under the portraits of grim Knights and pictured Saints. Juan hears a sound like a mouse rustling in the corner, and is petrified to behold the hooded figure pass him three times, glancing on him a bright eye. Lara sees nothing except his vastly enlarged shadow on the walls, but some nameless horror causes him, or an unworldly visitant, to shriek and rouse the whole house; he falls down in a deathlike trance from which he is recovered with difficulty. Juan recovers his senses unaided, finds that his eyes still work all right, reads an old newspaper to compose his mind, and goes to bed and to sleep without causing any disturbance. A reluctance to speak of their experience, however, and an effort to hide any traces of perturbation mark the behavior of both heroes the morning after.

Thus far the Don Juan ghost story is merely the Lara one seen through an unclouded, unemotional pair of eyes. Lara, which is pure Gothic in the manner of the Castle of Otranto, has been translated into the idiom of real life. The specter, or the supernatural appearance, is given equal credit in both poems. It belongs to the vast army of ghosts whom Gothic novelists loved to employ as monitors of dire events to come. In Lara, the supernatural experience is dropped—it has served its purpose—and the bloody and catastrophic events ensue. In Don Juan, like Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, or more properly like Monk Lewis's, the natural explanation of the supernatural is suggested in her Grace of Fitz-Fulke's impersonation of the ghost. Byron's treatment of this ghost-story is typically Don Juanesque; it is antisentimental and self-mocking, but it shows under a mask of skepticism, humor, and disillusionment, an undeniable will to believe.

3

Claude Fuess has noted the possibility that Byron in his description of the assemblage at Norman Abbey “was influenced to some extent by Thomas Love Peacock.”¹⁹ Whether it is influence or coincidence, the affinity between Byron's and Peacock's satires of society is well worth examining.

Byron's acquaintance with Peacock was only at second hand through Shelley, who sent Byron a copy of Melincourt as soon as it appeared in 1817. In 1821, out of all the pamphlets and articles occasioned by the first few cantos of Don Juan, the one that elicited a favorable response from Byron was “John Bull's” Letter to the Right Hon. Lord Byron. He admired the author's clever writing, full of “fun and ferocity,” and was no doubt pleased by the comparison of Don Juan to Scott's novels and the suggestion that Byron should continue the poem by writing about England in the reign of George IV. Byron wrote to Murray to learn who was the author; he suspected Hobhouse, Peacock, and D'Israeli, possibly Washington Irving. But a few weeks later he had settled on Peacock, who learned from Shelley's letter, when Shelley was visiting Byron at Ravenna: “Lord B. thinks you wrote a pamphlet signed John Bull; he says he knew it by the style resembling Melincourt, of which he is a great admirer.”²⁰ Byron seems to have accorded Peacock the sincere flattery of imitation in his latter cantos of Don Juan, for his satire on England and English society shares many of the techniques and opinions of Peacock's.

Melincourt is perhaps not so successful a sample of the Peacockian recipe for the intellectual novel as his later Crotchet Castle, but it contains all the essential ingredients and is almost equally diverting. The most obvious mechanical resemblance between it and Don Juan is the use of the house party and the banquet as settings for the meeting of minds and of fools. Both Peacock and Byron use allegorical names, a trick borrowed from Greek and English satiric comedy. Peacock has his Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub, Mr. Hippy, Mr. Fax, Mr. Feathernest, and Mr. Mol(e)y Mystic (i.e. Coleridge) in his Cimmerian Lodge. Byron gives us the young bard Rackrhyme, Sir John Pottledeep, the six Miss Rawbolds, and the Reverend Rodomont Precisian. All the types of politicians, intellectuals, social climbers, fools and eccentrics, many of them thin disguises for real people, make up the parties at Norman Abbey, Miss Anthelia Melincourt's castle, and Mr. Forester's country house. Byron complains, however, that

“The days of Comedy are gone, alas!
                    When Congreve's fool could vie with Molière's
                              bête:
Society is smoothed to that excess,
That manners hardly differ more than dress.”

He is unwilling to go to such lengths of fantasy as Peacock in his social satire.

The interpolated songs in Melincourt, usually sung by Miss Anthelia to the harp, recall Lady Adeline's ballad of the Norman Abbey friar. The electioneering of Sir Oran-haut-ton and Mr. Sarcastic at the borough of Onevote, aided by the citizens of Novote, suggests Lord Henry's electioneering, for it is based on the same principles of maintaining Place and Patronage. The chess-dance, following Mr. Forester's Anti-Saccharine banquet, recalls Byron's metaphor:

“Good company's a chess-board—there are kings,
                    Queens, bishops, knights, rooks, pawns; the World's a game;
Save that the puppets pull at their own strings,
                    Methinks gay Punch hath something of the
                              same.”

Dr. Killquick and his medicines, from whose fatal ministrations Mr. Hippy is always just being saved by some lucky accident, are echoed in Byron's gibes at the medical profession. Other butts of Peacock's incidental satire are the same that Byron loved to shoot at: Southey (Mr. Feathernest), Wordsworth (Mr. Paperstamp), Coleridge, the Legitimate Review (i.e. the Quarterly), and Lord Castlereagh, with his strange jargon, especially the phrase “venerable feature.”

The “plot” of Peacock's novel, like Byron's, is matchmaking. Anthelia, the heiress, brought up like Aurora Raby in a truly unworldly fashion, is looking around for a husband, and she becomes involved in Mrs. Pinmoney's matchmaking efforts on behalf of her nephew Sir Telegraph and her daughter Miss Danaretta Contantina. Melincourt, like Don Juan, contains strong satire on the marriage market, marriage à la mode, the importance of money in making a good match, and the feeble and pernicious education of fashionable women. Mrs. Pinmoney, incidentally, enumerates among other fads of the day, “a taste for enjoying the country in November, and wintering in London till the end of the dog-days.”

But the story of Anthelia and her suitors is only a narrative line on which to hang the main matters of Melincourt, contained in the discussions and diversions. Mr. Fax and Mr. Forester hold informal debates on political and social economy. Mr. Fax represents the theories of Malthus and Bentham, while Mr. Forester, the Rousseauistic philosopher and hero, holds less pedantic and more traditional views, relying on reason and the natural goodness of man. It is obvious where Peacock's sympathies lie. A whole chapter is concerned with the Principle of Population, and the intellectual climax of the book occurs in Chapter XL, “The Hopes of the World,” in which the two gentlemen, just about to conclude successfully their rescue of the kidnapped Anthelia, sit down gravely to discuss with deep philosophy the future of England. Byron avoided this burlesque of reality by merely suspending his story while, as author, he digresses into philosophy, instead of trying to dramatize it in dialogue.

The thesis of Peacock's novel, demonstrated in these discussions and in the story of poor Desmond and his experiences with Mr. Vamp, the editor of the Legitimate Review, is that a politically corrupt society is being duped into hypocritical complacency by prating about morals. In the council of war held by the Legitimate Reviewers at Mainchance Villa, for example, the slogan “The church is in danger” is raised whenever reason threatens to take hold of the proceedings and defeat the sophistries of those defending the status quo. At Mr. Forester's banquet, Mr. Sarcastic delivers an oration against the power of Custom to entrench error and wickedness. Later comments in a more elegiac strain bewail the feebleness of natural feelings laid asleep by Custom.

“Vices of unfrequent occurrence stand sufficiently self-exposed in the insulation of their own deformity. The vices that call for the scourge of satire, are those which pervade the whole frame of society, and which, under some specious pretence of private duty, or the sanction of custom and precedent, are almost permitted to assume the semblance of virtue, or at least to pass unstigmatized in the crowd of congenial transgressions.”²¹

This saying of Mr. Forester's represents the primary thesis of Byron's satire on society, and sums up the difference between the satire in Pope's poetry and that in Peacock's novels and Byron's Don Juan. “Manners now make men,” says Byron; “Be not what you seem, but what you see.” Byron will be content to live in exile with beautiful Truth, as long as error and hypocrisy rule in England. The same classicist admiration of reason, common sense, and moderation, tinged by Shaftsburian and Rousseauistic conceptions of the natural goodness of man and the pernicious influence of society, pervades both Peacock's and Byron's thought.

With this scale of value Byron measured mankind and the world with a just proportion. The denials of value or of constancy in the temporary show of things passed in review through Don Juan are the repeated answers of the perfectionist forced to comment on an imperfect world. They should be read in the light of Byron's subsequent behavior in the imperfect world of Greek revolution and political skullduggery as much as in his surrender to imperfection of life in Venice and London. For, as Lord Ernle has pointed out, Byron had one solitary conviction on the value of moral action, that bridged the hiatus between his abstract beliefs and his practice: through courageous moral action, the world will achieve the ideal of liberty.

The history of Byron's intellectual skepticism is the drama of the opposing tendencies in his nature toward participation and toward isolation. He is a skeptic who would like to persuade himself that he is perfectly poised in his skepticism, but who is really so uncomfortable in it that he is constantly launching out on a new, though hopeless, struggle toward belief. He longs to believe and shrinks from believing because he thinks himself incurably solitary and independent at the center of opposing systems. During most of his life he is unwilling to commit himself, either in poetry or in action. Nature and fate have made him solitary and an outsider. He cannot give himself wholly to anything, to an individual, a social group, a party, or a system of belief. He is the Pilgrim of Eternity. Yet he longed to submit and to be absorbed. The glory of Byron's life is that at last he did commit himself in the cause of Greek liberty. It does not do to explain away this last decided commitment by references to his ambition, to his boredom, and to all the other motives for the Greek expedition which were most undoubtedly and compellingly present. The fact of heroic self-sacrifice remains. Byron was right when he said that we should not dig for motives and causes and thereby destroy the value of a good deed and a good effect:

“’T is sad to hack into the root of things,
                    They are so much intertwisted with the earth;
So that the branch a goodly verdure flings,
                    I reck not if an acorn gave it birth.”

He begged Colonel Stanhope to judge him by his actions and not by his words. This final commitment was what Byron was working out for himself in Don Juan, explaining his origin and his history, not in any crassly objective autobiography, but in the deepest sense, in the mirror of poetry. Don Juan was to have died for human freedom. Byron left the word and took up the deed: he completed Don Juan in action.

Notes

1. Lucian, Loeb Classical Library transl., IV, 97-99 & 107-109.

2. Don Juan, IX, 13-21.

3. Anatomy of Melancholy, Everyman edition, I, 55-56.

4. See Irwin, The Making of Jonathan Wild, New York, Columbia University Press, 1941.

5. ll. 217-258.

6. L. & J., V, 161-163.

7. I am indebted to Professor Marjorie Nicolson for the reminder that Burton's passage on this subject is founded upon an equally famous and earlier one, that in Bacon's Advancement of Learning, which was also known and admired by Johnson.

8. Ibid., 173.

9. Ibid., 465.

10. Cf. Henry Martyn's letter to Steele (Spectator, No. 180).

11. Composed at Hamburg in 1813, and republished in Constant's Cours de politique constitutionelle, 4 vols., 1817-1820. See its recent republication as Prophecy from the Past; on the Conquest and Usurpation, ed. and transl. by Helen Lippmann, N. Y., Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941.

12. My translation.

13. Vol. II, 206-207. My translation.

14. Siege of Corinth, ll. 781 ff.

15. Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto IX, Fairfax's translation.

16. V, 447.

17. L. & J., VI, 186-188.

18. Hobhouse, Recollections, III, 29.

19. Fuess, Lord Byron as a Satirist, 172, footnote.

20. Letters of Shelley, ed. by Roger Ingpen, London, Pitman, 1909, II, 897. Peacock discounted Byron's praise of Melincourt, laying it to Shelley's kindness.

21. Melincourt, 178.

Selected List of Works Consulted

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.

Fuess, Claude M., Lord Byron as a Satirist in Verse, New York, Columbia University Press, 1912.

Ingpen, Roger, editor, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London, Pitman, 1909. 2 vols.