SOURCE: Graham, Peter W. “England in Don Juan.” In Don Juan and Regency England, pp. 125-56. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

[In the following essay, Graham illustrates the ways in which Byron set Don Juan against the mores of Regency England and argues that the poem was written both for and from the viewpoint of the “cultivated man.”]

If the world is the aggregate of all that is dynamically affective, then the cultivated man will never succeed in living in just one world.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

The last three essays have shown several pragmatic reasons not to put “just one world” into literature if that one world is one's own, several different ways of telling English truths but telling them slant. In Letters from England, Southey assumed a Spanish mask that safely distanced him from his pronouncements on the mother country and also gave his opinions at least a semblance of cultural comparison. The English pantomime managed to be topical, timely, and irreverent under the Examiner's watchful eye by presenting home truths and personages in fantastic scenes and manifestly unreal guises. Even Lady Caroline Lamb showed some prudence (if not enough) in displacing the tumultuous half-realities of Glenarvon from England, where they occurred, to Ireland, where she was sent that they might not continue.

We have seen that Don Juan, like Letters from England, Glenarvon, and the English pantomime, is made from domestica facta. Like the other works, it strategically ranges beyond the microcosmic source of its materials. As its preliminaries suggest, the poem is not so much about its Spanish protagonist and the lands in which he finds himself as about its British author, the British narrator through whom he speaks, and the island home they both know best of the many scenes and societies depicted—not Britain isolated so much as Britain compared with other places, peoples, and times. How Byron introduces the matter and mores of Regency England into a narrative set elsewhere, as Don Juan's story is from its outset until the sixty-fifth stanza of canto 10, will be the subject of this chapter. Why Byron does so is evident in this chapter's epigraph. The choice is more principled than practical. Having already offended his native land enough to feel himself an outcast and to act out that perceived exile, Byron had no compulsion to be anything more or less than direct in commenting on the British microcosm—but as romantic ironist and as urbane aristocrat he surely would feel the philosophical force of Schlegel's case for cosmopolitanism. Whether or not he had firsthand knowledge of the fragment or the Schlegelian opinion it crystallizes (and he may well have, for Friedrich's brother A. W. Schlegel was at Coppet when Byron stayed there in 1816), the position was one he shared. Byron's most famous endorsement of worldly experience, a statement that fleshes out Schlegel's elegant abstraction, comes in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird: “As to ‘Don Juan’—confess—confess—you dog—and be candid—that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing—it may be bawdy—but is it not good English?—it may be profligate—but is it not life, is it not the thing?—Could any man have written it—who has not lived in the world?—and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis?—on a table?—and under it?” (LJ 6:232) “Good English”—“life”—“the thing”: as adequate a summation of Don Juan as five words are likely to convey.

Byron's choosing cosmopolitanism rather than insularity suggests things about him, but also about his ideal reader, a nonexistent being whose perfect blend of birth, breeding, erudition, experience, wit, feeling, vigor, tolerance, conviction, and various other excellences was lacking in his real readers, even those men of the world to whom he addressed his epistolary glosses on the poetic endeavor: Moore, Murray, Hobhouse, Kinnaird. I would suggest that the dominant voice heard in Don Juan belongs to a British version of Schlegel's “cultivated man.” Though the poem may be “remarkably unprescriptive of its reader”¹ in the sense of offering richly diverse things to a heterogeneous audience, much of the time this British cosmopolite utters words intended chiefly, or at any rate immediately, for other cultivated men of his own society and time. The poem characteristically speaks about women rather than to them, alludes to posterity instead of addressing it, shows a wide knowledge of disparate nations and classes that is itself a crucial characteristic of that exclusive club of cultivated Englishmen to which Byron belongs and in which he is at pains to place his narrator and to find some of his most important readers, if not all of them. To validate his and the narrator's credentials as fellow initiates, Byron must display from the start his understanding of the milieu in which his ideal reader resides as well as those circles through which his fictive protagonist moves. Because “soundness” in certain crucial insular matters is a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to pronounce on wider concerns, England must be brought into Don Juan long before Don Juan is brought into England. How to do so? Largely, of course, through the famous digressions. But in Don Juan cultural comparison is yet more pervasive than digressions alone would allow it to be. Other strategies are necessary. All of them, along with the digressions, can be seen as varieties of parabasis—a phenomenon that now calls for a few explanatory words.

Parabasis, literally a “coming forward,” is a feature of Greek Old Comedy—a suspension of action that takes place at or toward the middle of the play as the chorus, alone in the orchestra and unmasked, advances to present the author's sincerely and strongly held opinions, whether on art, politics, religion, or other timely matters. The parabasis shatters dramatic illusion: as Gilbert Norwood puts it, “such a passage—or rather such a conglomerate of songs and non-dramatic recitative—is prima facie inconceivable in the centre of a drama.”² But suspending the play's action and thereby stressing its illusory nature effectively contributes to the comic whole. Schlegel drew upon the paradox inherent in this theatrical convention to account for the simultaneous creation and destruction that constitute irony: irony, as Schlegel sees it, is “permanent parabasis.” Hans Eichner points out that the Greek word parekbasis is also Schlegel's preferred term for that literary technique we tend to call “digression”³—and digression is one way for Byron's alter ego the narrator to step forward unmasked (while still masking the author) in Don Juan. There are smaller, less obvious ways of highlighting the fictive nature of the poem's narrative—providing glimpses of the stage manager behind the pantomime scenes, the essential Englishness underlying the apparent internationalism. One such means is through distinctively English mispronunciation of foreign names and other words, a strategy examined in the discussion of opening signals. Another is the continual presence of literary allusions, tags that incrementally demonstrate Byron's status as not just a well-bred cosmopolite but also a well-read one. It would be digressive here to deal at length with particular allusions—anyone requiring general confirmation of how fast, dense, and various the literary quotations, anecdotes, references, and parodies spill forth can find the proof required on most any page of McGann's resourceful notes to the Oxford Don Juan. For now let it suffice to say that Shakespeare, the Bible, Horace, Milton, and other venerable ingredients contribute significantly to Byron's simmering literary stew—as can less-familiar or less-respected materials, among them the three I have discussed at length: Southey, Caroline Lamb, the spectacular theater of commedia and pantomime.

Some of Don Juan's allusions are obvious. Others are exceedingly subtle. Still others, I suspect, are virtually undetectable—Byron's literary dandyism manifesting itself in exclusive jokes unperceived by anyone but their perpetrator. The obvious allusions (for instance, the “poetical commandments” of canto 1) give clear warning of what Byron's game will be. The subtler ones lead readers who recognize them to admire Byron and congratulate themselves for mental agility, thereby forging a community of wit, a select society of minds thinking alike. Shared allusions, in other words, can be Byron's way of telling England's cultural elite that “I am one of you”—and his readers' way of recognizing that, whatever place and time they inhabit, they can for a moment think like Byron. Private allusions (or perhaps they should be called elusions) set a limit on this consensus of author and audience. They are the poet's way of not only keeping even his finest readers from full competence but also preventing those readers from achieving any clear sense of the ground and extent of their incompetence, in this way thwarting their chance of having, like Socrates, at least the sure knowledge of ignorance that is the first step away from it.

English interjections, from the lengthiest digressions to the most inobtrusive touches of diction, are moments of parabasis in that they take us out of the world contrived for Don Juan's adventures and back to the “real” one Byron and his characterized reader have in common. Let us first see how the feat is accomplished in the second, third, and fourth cantos, where the narrative element is comparatively strong, the tendency to digress is less pronounced than elsewhere, and there is as yet no embodiment of English values within the tale itself. Here, in blending shipwreck, piracy, idyllic love, and slavery, Juan's story is as engaging as it ever will be. Even so, we are detached from the narrative and removed from its locale by frequent and artfully placed parabases—English intrusions on a Mediterranean tale.

Canto 1 ends with a parabasis—the previously quoted and discussed couplet on Southey's borrowed rhymes and Byron's feigned fear that the lines be taken for his—and canto 2 begins with parabasis. Before the narrative resumes there is of course no way to digress from it; instead, the poem hovers between England and the Mediterranean, between fiction and teasingly real “Byroniana.” We start off facing a generalization that is either obtuse or mockingly insincere—and given the nature of the narrator as revealed in the first canto, the latter seems likelier:

Oh ye! who teach the ingenuous youth of nations,
          Holland, France, England, Germany, or Spain,
I pray ye flog them upon all occasions,
          It mends their morals, never mind the pain.

(DJ 2.1)

The second half of the stanza returns to Juan, whose “best of mothers and of educations” (equally evident insincerity) had in the previous canto failed to preserve the morals and modesty of which he has been divested “in a way, that's rather of the oddest” (insincere again, the “way” referred to being entirely natural and ordinary). Thereby a contrast is set up between the north and the south—and set up as could be done only by someone who knows both well enough to ridicule their different hypocrisies, as an “Englishman resident in Spain” or a “Spaniard who had travelled in England” might do.

Because the narrator has already made a perverse point of being wrongheaded in this canto's first few assertions, the audience is conditioned to reverse his next claim, a retrospective suggestion that a “public school” would have been just the thing to have cooled Juan's adolescent fancy (DJ 2.2). Having made that reversal, the reader who knows something of Byron is encouraged to think of the poet's “hot youth,” not much damped down by Harrow. The ensuing coy reference to Juan's “lady-mother, mathematical, / A———never mind” (DJ 2.3) likewise sends us back to Byron's personal history and specifically to Annabella, though if charged with mental manipulation of this sort he could plead innocent in just the same way that his narrator could deny bitch being the word meant to fill his pause, even though it is the noun most readers will instinctively supply⁴ given that the context is a witty, racy poem, the referent is a female inclined to be selfish, devious, and hypocritical, and the next person to be characterized is graced with an animal epithet (“his tutor, an old ass”).

Turning to Juan's story and then away from it, the narrator dispatches his protagonist to Cadiz, then uses this shift of scene to call attention to his own traits. Not the least of these is digressiveness, for after a single line of narrative, the poem devotes three stanzas to characterizing its narrator:

I said, that Juan had been sent to Cadiz—
          A pretty town, I recollect it well—
'Tis there the mart of the colonial trade is
          (Or was, before Peru learn'd to rebel)
And such sweet girls—I mean, such graceful ladies,
          Their very walk would make your bosom swell;
I can't describe it, though so much it strike,
Nor liken it—I never saw the like:

6

An Arab horse, a stately stag, a barb
          New broke, a cameleopard, a gazelle,
No—none of these will do;—and then their garb!
          Their veil and petticoat—Alas! to dwell
Upon such things would very near absorb
          A canto—then their feet and ancles—well,
Thank heaven I've got no metaphor quite ready,
(And so, my sober Muse—come, let's be steady—

7

Chaste Muse!—well, if you must, you must)—the veil
          Thrown back a moment with the glancing hand,
While the o'erpowering eye, that turns you pale,
          Flashes into the heart:—All sunny land
Of love! when I forget you, may I fail
          To—say my prayers—but never was there plann'd
A dress through which the eyes give such a volley,
Excepting the Venetian Fazzioli.

We understand here that the narrator has traveled widely. He “recollects” Cadiz and must have been to Venice, having seen its distinctive local costume; and the procession of exotic beasts implies even more extensive journeying. We infer that his experience of women is equally wide and appreciative, Spanish women being admired in a comparative way. This connoisseur of places and women is someone whose handling of the English language and poetic conventions is both masterful and light. At once serious and playful, he demands that characterizations be accurate and that figurative tropes be precisely chosen and employed only when necessary, yet he trifles with his “chaste” and “sober” muse as if she herself were some “sweet girl”—even violating the integrity of her stanzas by leaving a parenthesis open when the couplet has closed. Rhetorically ingenious, he succeeds in having things both ways—as evidenced by his including images (like the quadraped menagerie in stanza 6) to reject them, and his pausing before, then censoring, unsuitable sentiments (“may I fail / To———say my prayers”) to emphasize them. The experiences, values, and personality conveyed through this description overlap with Byron's but cannot be proved his alone in that none of the details are unique to him—they might portray any number of intelligent, amorous, and eloquent English travelers.

So might most of the other British parabases in this canto and the two following. Only a few details truly single out Byron among cosmopolitan English aristocrats. The assertion in canto 2 that Juan is a strong swimmer alludes, as Byron could not resist doing when circumstances were appropriate, to his own notable exploit in that line—“He could, perhaps, have pass'd the Hellespont, / As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided) / Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did” (DJ 2.105)—a “real” moment whose reality is undercut by its own miniature parabasis, when the mythic Leander is brought into the company of Ekenhead and Byron. The descriptions of Juan's sufferings at sea, the facts of which come from various sources, explicitly acknowledge just one literary progenitor, A Narrative of the Honourable John Byron … : “his hardships were comparative / To those related in my grand-dad's Narrative” (DJ 2.137). Apart from these cases, though, the narrator's momentary intrusions of English matters and tastes do not uniquely characterize Byron, though they certainly fit him as well or better than they do anyone else.

The most important of such instances is a digression that rises out of Juan's linguistic apprenticeship in Romaic, his personal tutor on the pirate's island being the pirate's daughter Haidée. The circumstances remind the narrator of what delightful incentives to learning (and not learning) he has enjoyed in similar situations:

They smile so when one's right, and when one's wrong
          They smile still more, and then there intervene
Pressure of hands, perhaps even a chaste kiss;—
I learn'd the little that I know by this:

165

That is, some words of Spanish, Turk, and Greek,
          Italian not at all, having no teachers;
Much English I cannot pretend to speak,
          Learning that language chiefly from its preachers,
Barrow, South, Tillotson, whom every week
          I study, also Blair, the highest reachers
Of eloquence in piety and prose—
I hate your poets, so read none of those.

166

As for the ladies, I have nought to say,
          A wanderer from the British world of fashion,
Where I, like other “dogs, have had my day,”
          Like other men too, may have had my passion.

In this passage the narrator supplies some details that accurately suggest Byron: travel, international adventures with women, wide reading, status in the Great World. Merrily blended with these specifics are others so blatantly uncharacteristic of Byron's situation (the claims of not having an amiable woman to teach him Italian, of having gained what small skill in English is his from parsons rather than poets, of having “nought to say” about the ladies) that they call to mind Byron's great love of mystifying an audience and thus suggest him equally as well as the accurate details do. But however successful this passage may be in turning the reader's mind to Byron in particular, it could with equal justice be applied to many another member of that class of Englishmen to which he belongs.

Attitudes distinguishing a cultural type, not merely Byron, similarly emerge when a generalization that real women surpass their stone likenesses conjures up the narrator's memory of “an Irish lady, to whose bust / I ne'er saw justice done,” (DJ 2.119)—or when meditation on the costly nature of love makes him muse, “I wonder Castlereagh don't tax 'em” (DJ 2.203)—or when professed hatred of “that air / Of clap-trap, which your recent poets prize” (DJ 2.124) impels him to forego tantalizing suspense and identify Haidée and Zoe directly and honestly. These last three examples introduce a particular British, if not uniquely Byronic, frame of mind into the Oriental tale of Juan and Haidée. The persona spinning this Mediterranean romance is someone who can claim acquaintance with society beauties such as Lady Adelaide Forbes (the likely inspiration of the sculptural digression)⁵ and their portraits. He is someone who implicitly disapproves of Foreign Secretary Castlereagh and his taxes. He is someone who opposes imported poetical systems and provincial self-congratulations of the kind the Lakers, Bowles, and other debased moderns inflict upon their readers—and the word he chooses to characterize their efforts is apt, economical, down to earth, and distinctively English.⁶ The perspective from which such a being surveys the world is liberally Whig yet a bit beyond all parties, classically Augustan yet individualistically eclectic, elitist in several senses—it is a British viewpoint but certainly not the common one.

The more conscious we are of this perspective from which the narrator looks on his world and assembles his story, the less power the narrative has to absorb us. It is especially important that we are distanced from the story at the crucial beginnings and endings of cantos—a strategy begun in canto 1 and continued without variation in the three succeeding ones. We have already seen how the narrator draws attention away from Juan and Spain, toward himself, Byron, and their English context in the first stanzas of canto 2. This canto ends as so many do with the narrator digressing into the apparently personal. He begins by recognizing—as the reader already must have done—how his protagonist, like other versions of Don Juan and like Glenarvon in a passage quoted in the last chapter, has forgotten his absent love because of the present one. A general explanation of such behavior follows. Then comes application of the law to a particular case, the narrator's own:

I hate inconstancy—I loathe, detest,
          Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal made
Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast
          No permanent foundation can be laid;
Love, constant love, has been my constant guest,
          And yet last night, being at a masquerade,
I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan,
Which gave me some sensations like a villain.

210

But soon Philosophy came to my aid,
          And whisper'd “think of every sacred tie!”
“I will, my dear Philosophy!” I said,
          “But then her teeth, and then, Oh heaven! her eye!
I'll just inquire if she be wife or maid,
                    Or neither—out of curiosity.”
“Stop!” cried Philosophy, with air so Grecian,
(Though she was masqued then as a fair Venetian.)

211

“Stop!” so I stopp'd.—But to return: that which
          Men call inconstancy is nothing more
Than admiration due where nature's rich
          Profusion with young beauty covers o'er
Some favour'd object; and as in the niche
          A lovely statue we almost adore,
This sort of adoration of the real
Is but a heightening of the “beau ideal.”

At this point the narrator is playing a complex game, the old platonic one of appearance and reality. The “real” Venetian lady costumed as the muse of philosophy is herself only a particular mortal embodiment of that universal and immortal essence impersonated through her disguise: notice that though the lady is at the masquerade, Philosophy is designated the actual role player, “being masqued then as a fair Venetian.” Similarly, the narrator is a false face perfectly fitting (and also patterned on) Byron, the expatriate reveling, as his letters of the period announce, in the pleasures of Venice—pleasures dependent for their full flavor upon the contrasting recollected tastes of England.⁷ But “Byron” in the letters and in this digression is a representative man of his class and nation. Several signs to this effect are evident in what Mikhail Bakhtin would call the “hybrid utterances”⁸ of the final four stanzas, where diction, figurative language, and allusion all undercut the plausibility of the poem's fictive world. The usual means of shattering such an illusion is to emphasize the artificial nature of the literary work—here the method is to highlight Don Juan's connections with “reality” known and shared by Byron, his narrator, and his implied reader. Among the specifics better suited to Regency England than Lambro's isle are “beau ideal,” a French phrase indispensable to the vocabulary of the Great World, and “killing” used in its English slang sense (“graces quite as killing”) with a British coin, the “shilling,” as its rhyme (DJ 2.213). Calling a tearful existence “the English climate of our years” (DJ 2.214) and alluding to Burton by labeling this discussion of melancholy an “anatomy” (DJ 2.216) similarly enhance the aristocratic English author and narrator and diminish the exotic Juan and Haidée, who are the merest of contrivances as the canto winds up:

In the mean time, without proceeding more
          In this anatomy, I've finish'd now
Two hundred and odd stanzas as before,
          That being about the number I'll allow
Each canto of the twelve, or twenty-four.

(DJ 2.216)

Canto 3 begins and ends with just this sort of nonchalant yet insistent undermining of the story, characters, setting, and literary conventions. “Hail Muse! et cetera.—We left Juan sleeping” is the brilliantly laconic start of canto 3, which leaves the hero to his happy unmarried slumbers for eleven stanzas, while love and marriage are examined and found analogous to wine and vinegar. The generalization holds in all climes and at all times. Petrarch, Dante, Milton, and by implication Byron himself illustrate different facets of the incompatibility of love and marriage. But the peculiar institution analyzed seems to be modern English marriage. Both terms and ideas are close to those found in Glenarvon, where, as we have seen, “In her first passion woman loves her lover” (DJ 3.3) and “a woman planted—/ … After a decent time must be gallanted” (DJ 3.4) and “love and marriage rarely can combine, / Although they both are born in the same clime” (DJ 3.5) and “Men grow ashamed of being so very fond” (DJ 3.7).

The narrator suspends the idyll of Juan and Haidée after only some sixty stanzas in which the narrative advances hardly at all—stanzas presenting Lambro's Odyssean return to a “house no more his home” and his almost voyeuristic presence at the lovers' richly described feast—and for the last quarter of the canto turns to various poetical and metapoetical concerns, most immediately offering the famous “isles of Greece” lyric sung to Haidée, Juan, and their guests by a poet “With truth like Southey and with verse like Crashaw” (DJ 3.79). This lyric and its context richly complicate the Dedication's fairly simple notion that bad poetry rises from bad politics and vice versa. “The isles of Greece” is the song of a crass opportunist “preferring pudding to no praise” (DJ 3.79). Yet it is a work of genius. Not because of its political message, for that “glorious idea crumbles on closer inspection,” as Malcolm Kelsall convincingly demonstrates⁹—but because it superbly achieves its generic task. A drinking song, it presents all that such a work is meant to: alternating exaltations and abasements that are sometimes personal and sometimes universal, sentiments and ironies now pleasing, now pleasantly painful. “The isles of Greece” blends oppositions to achieve the complexity that distinguishes a singularily beautiful lyric, or wine, from the ordinarily agreeable many. But my main concern here is with the poet rather than his poem. Though solidly grounded on Lambro's island, this “sad trimmer” draws our attention away from the world in which he sings and back to the real one with its real islands, especially the Venetian one where Byron composes to please himself and the British one where Southey, like the Greek poet, “earn'd his laureate pension” (DJ 3.80).

Characterizing his nameless modern poet, Byron is at his ironic and cosmopolitan best. He inscribes the portrait with more meaning than a reader impatient for resumed action, distracted by the lyric interlude, or intent on finding a key to real people behind the poem's fictions is likely to detect. Obviously the “turncoat” is meant to mirror Southey, and by extension Wordsworth and Coleridge, the trio of Lakers whose common excursion from the liberal sentiments of their youth is to be explicitly denounced a few stanzas farther on (DJ 3.93-95). But there is more. To start, there is the mention of Richard Crashaw, not just a metaphysical poet whose distinctive verse might evoke ridicule in a more austere age and a man whose name can make a comic rhyme for “Pacha.” Byron introduces Crashaw because he, like Southey and the unnamed poet, is a kind of turncoat: the son of a noted Puritan cleric, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Like another changeable poet, the Byron of Don Juan, he also left England for Italy and abandoned English verse forms for contemporary Italian models. Thus through his likeness to Crashaw the Greek poet serves as a personal bridge connecting Southey with the Byronic narrator, who is very close to Byron at this point in the poem, and whose “hot youth—when George the Third was king” (DJ 1.212) provides a phrase echoed in the description of this Greek poet's “singing as he sung in his warm youth” (DJ 3.83). In fact, many of the descriptions of the Greek lyricist seem to embody Byron's sort of adaptability more than Southey's.¹⁰ A few examples:

He was a man who had seen many changes,
          And always changed as true as any needle;

(DJ 3.80)

He had travell'd 'mongst the Arabs, Turks, and Franks,
          And knew the self-loves of the different nations;

(DJ 3.84)

His muse made increment of any thing,
          From the high lyric down to the low rational:

(DJ 3.85)

Standing behind all these changeable English poets is the venerable Horace, who having praised the republic could praise Augustus—and having shifted his ground could admit as much. As Kelsall has observed, the Horatian admission itself appears in Don Juan¹¹—aptly quoted at the start of the stanza where the Byronic narrator comments on how he has changed since his “hot youth”: “‘Non ego hoc ferrem calida juventa / Consule Planco’” (DJ 1.212).

Presenting a number of actual turncoat poets in one unnamed fictional lyricist is an act of construction analogous to the Grimaldi Clown's ingenious arrangement of assorted objects into visual similes or an oversacription like Caroline Lamb's choice of St. Clare, a name resonant with too many possible meanings to permit its working into a scheme of roman à clef. Byron's mixture of models brilliantly demonstrates that “impurity” need not debase and can actually strengthen a literary fabrication. Paradoxically, the existence of several possible models, rather than just one, confers self-sufficient integrity on the created character: because the singer of “The isles of Greece” is not purely Southey, or Byron, or Crashaw, or Horace, he can be pure poet. His essence, undiluted by the extraneous biographical attributes of any single personality, is composed of two elements: verbal talent and changeability. Through the essential example provided by the unnamed poet Byron surprises us into seeing the basic similarity between mobility, an excusable and sometimes even admirable quality in the poem, and treachery, one of the most despicable traits presented. Mobility unites many of the most important real and fictive people of Don Juan: the Lakers, Byron, the narrator, Don Juan, John Johnson, Julia, Lady Adeline Amundeville. Noticing this affinity between amiable characters and contemptible ones, we are driven to search for a telling distinction. We find one, I think, in the fact that a shift of position can be disinterested or interested, natural or calculated, a matter of temperament or a means of opportunism, an affirmation or a denial of what is best in the mixed nature of the mobile being.

I hope that this look at the singer of “The isles of Greece” has demonstrated how helpful to appreciating Don Juan, in fact how down-right indispensable to understanding certain aspects of the poem, is the cosmopolitan “cultivation” spoken of in this chapter's epigraph from Schlegel—the traveling beyond our personal boundaries that brings us closer to being Byron's ideal readers. The unnamed versifier whom we have been considering is a character completely enclosed in Don Juan's fictive world; and he is almost an abstraction—the Poet pared down to a pair of defining traits (talent and mobility) along with those minimal attributes no human being can lack (a time, a place, a gender). But is this picture of the Poet a good likeness? And what is its significance? We are better able to judge if we can follow the inductive process Byron has implied in abstracting this modern Greek manifestation of the Poet from at least four real-life poetic chameleons, if we bring to the story information from other worlds, particularly from the classical and English literary traditions. Information, both intensive and extensive, is especially necessary as canto 3 closes and canto 4 begins. The stanzas spanned by this part of the poem (DJ 3.87-111 and 4.1—7) constitute the Byronic parabasis that most closely resembles the composite poetic device as Aristophanes, for instance, would have employed it. We part from the fictional world of Lambro's island with stanza 87's summation of the Greek poet's performance (“Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung, / The modern Greek, in tolerable verse”)—briefly return to “our tale” in the first six lines of stanza 101, which merely tell us that the feast has ended and the lovers are alone at twilight—then pick up “Young Juan and his lady-love” after the couplet of the seventh stanza of canto 4 brings the digression to an explicit close (“Meanwhile Apollo plucks me by the ear, / And tells me to resume my story here”).

This parabasis is in many ways a difficult one to explicate. Its range of topics is extraordinarily wide, even for Don Juan. It proves as dense as the most heavily name-dropping sentences of the prose Preface—and its density is even harder to penetrate because the allusions are as often as not implied ones, literary tags in addition to names or titles.¹² Even its position in the poem poses a problem the reader must solve. If we recognize the parabasis as a logically continuous passage, we must admit that its continuity, its spilling over from the end of canto 3 to the start of canto 4, violates the poem's structure. At the same time, we must acknowledge that the integrity of the parabasis is itself violated by the conspicuous and self-contradictory utterances closing one canto and opening the other: the ostensibly arbitrary shutdown of canto 3 [“I feel this tediousness will never do—/ 'Tis being too epic, and I must cut down / (In copying) this long canto into two” (DJ 3.111)]—and the insistently introductory note struck by the first lines of canto 4: “Nothing so difficult as a beginning / In poesy, unless perhaps the end.”

One original canto or two? Signs point both ways—the logical continuity suggesting the former state, the poetic and rhetorical separation indicating the latter. As it happens, the two cantos were at first a single longer unit.¹³ Byron did, as he claims, divide the one sprawling canto into two parts. But why say that he has done so “in copying”—not the true moment of bisection, as the first line of canto 4 makes perfectly evident? Why make the self-nullifying announcement “They'll never find it out, unless I own / The fact” (DJ 3.111)? Breaking laws is an assertion of power; the more wanton the crash through barriers, the more graphic the display of force. By conspicuously flouting the rules ordinarily applicable to the shape of a rhetorical structure, whether a canto or a parabasis, Byron offers concrete evidence that the imaginative force called the poet need not respect the conventions that have risen in its arena of creation. In the next few paragraphs we shall see that the power of words and the lies of poets are two pivotal, interrelated concerns of the parabasis. Byron's playful inconsistencies in closing one canto and opening another enact on the level of poetic structure the very truths verbally asserted in the parabasis.

As we have seen, the Byronic narrator begins his parabasis by dismissing the “modern Greek” and his “tolerable verse” from the stage of the poem. Assessment of the Greek's achievement leads to generalization about all poets:

If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
          Yet in these times he might have done much worse:
His strain display'd some feeling—right or wrong;
          And feeling, in a poet, is the source
Of others' feeling; but they are such liars,
And take all colours—like the hands of dyers.

(DJ 3.87)

The dyer's hand stained by the colors it employs, affected by the effect it contrives, may be the most famous part of this passage, but there are other details well worth discussion. One such matter is the appositive liars and its homonym lyres. We have already seen that the lie and the lyre taken together characterize the poet of “The isles of Greece.” Because he is modern yet a countryman of Orpheus, an essence distilled from several real poets, the nameless singer can serve as Everypoet, a representative being connecting his high mythic prototype with Horace, Crashaw, Pope, Dryden, Byron—and also with debased contemporary practitioners of the art such as the detested Lakers, whose “names at present cut a convict figure, / The very Botany Bay in moral geography” (DJ 3.94). If we recognize that all poets are liars with lyres, we shall avoid certain erroneous assumptions, among them the unfounded faith that inferior poetry lacks the power to do harm and the equally false belief that great poetry straightforwardly reveals simple truth. Once we acknowledge that comparatively poor poetry may somehow endure and need not be completely impotent, we can understand why attacks on “bad poets” belong in Don Juan, despite Hobhouse's suggestion that “assault of the poor creatures so infinitely below you in poetical character would look to the world perfectly wanton and harmless except to your own great reputation which places you above even the chastisement of such grovellers.”¹⁴ And having generalized about the difficulty of finding truth in orphic utterances, where the “lie” may derive from the poet's misspeaking, the audience's misapprehending, or both, Byron has given us fair warning that even his own poetic assertions should not be uncritically accepted at face value.

Byron's remarks on poets and their productions are calculated to be universally relevant but particularly applicable to contemporary British realities. The parabasis announces timeless convictions but also provides a timely defense of Don Juan and an attack on those modern British poets who fall short of, and themselves assail, the standards it embodies, Augustan values inherited from Pope and Dryden. The power of poets' words justifies both the defense of “good” poets and the attack on “bad” ones: “feeling, in a poet, is the source / Of others' feelings” (DJ 3.87) and “words are things, and a small drop of ink, / Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think” (DJ 3.88). Ensuing stanzas offer ample evidence that words make truths and poets kindle feelings. “Troy owes to Homer that whist owes to Hoyle” (DJ 3.90); how the present generation sees Marlborough, Milton, and Burns depends in some measure on what features have been stressed by their respective biographers, Coxe, Johnson, and Currie (DJ 3.90, 91, 92). Having acknowledged that the writer's selectivity produces a new reality by determining the readers' image of whomever or whatever is being animated or reified through words, Byron takes prompt advantage of his right to select. As he sees it, the Lakers (most prominently Wordsworth) have misrepresented the Augustans (especially Dryden and Pope).¹⁵ The Lakers' views, however obscure and erroneous Byron may think them, have reached print and thus have a chance to “make thousands, perhaps millions, think.” But if Byron's own words can discredit the thinkers, he can counteract their thoughts. Accordingly, he selects and exaggerates a few salient features to represent the Lake-dwellers in his poem:

All are not moralists, like Southey, when
          He prated to the world of “Pantisocrasy;”
Or Wordsworth, unexcised, unhired, who then
          Season'd his pedlar poems with democracy;
Or Coleridge, long before his flighty pen
          Let to the Morning Post its aristocracy;
When he and Southey, following the same path,
Espoused two partners (milliners of Bath.)

(DJ 3.93)

Because Wordsworth is the one Laker who has most directly threatened the contemporary reputations of Dryden and Pope (and also perhaps because Byron accurately perceives him, with more talent than Southey and more productivity than Coleridge, as having the most potential to cut a figure for posterity), he bears the brunt of the literary attack, though the epic longeurs induced by Southey's epics do receive a stanza's attention (DJ 3.97). The case against Wordsworth is based on specific and fairly fresh evidence, the poems singled out for ridicule being the “drowsy frowzy” Excursion (its second edition having been published in 1820), “The Waggoner” (published in 1819), and “Peter Bell” (published in 1819). Wordsworth's shortcomings are presented not as debatable matters of taste but as downright deficiencies. In The Excursion Wordsworth “builds up a formidable dyke / Between his own and others' intellect” (DJ 3.95)—surely a flaw if words are meant to make others think. In “The Waggoners,” he is charged with plodding, provincial complacency (DJ 3.98). In “Peter Bell” he reveals a woeful lack of cultivation and sense. Byron's argument focuses on a detail that might, in less resourceful hands, furnish material for the merest quibble:

He wishes for “a boat” to sail the deeps—
          Of ocean?—No, of air; and then he makes
Another outcry for “a little boat,”
And drivels seas to set it well afloat.

(DJ 3.98)

In contrast to Wordsworth, the Byronic narrator, a man of common sense and uncommon cultivation, has no trouble finding an array of more felicitous possibilities:

If he must fain sweep o'er the etherial plain,
          And Pegasus runs restive in his “waggon,”
Could he not beg the loan of Charles's Wain?
          Or pray Medea for a single dragon?
Or if too classic for his vulgar brain,
          He fear'd his neck to venture such a nag on,
And he must needs mount nearer to the moon,
Could not the blockhead ask for a balloon?

(DJ 3.99)

Notice how the ground of criticism shifts away from strictly poetic concerns here: Wordsworth's choice of the “little boat” shows him not so much a bad poet as a fuzzy thinker, something likelier to arouse the contempt of a larger segment of Byron's audience. Furthermore, the narrator's catalogue of alternative means of transport manages to impute to poor Wordsworth various deficiencies not directly relevant to the detail under present consideration. By implication the author of “Peter Bell” is ill-grounded in the classics, inadequately equipped by training or temperament for horsemanship, even ignorant of technological developments. At the end of the indictment, the ideal reader of Don Juan is meant to conclude that Wordsworth notably lacks certain qualities cherished by that ruling-class culture to which both poet and audience belong. Wordsworth and “Trash of such sort” may sneer “at him who drew ‘Achitophel’” (DJ 3.100), but the reader is not likely to side with the sneerer after what the parabasis has done to him. Byron's portraits of the Lake poets and their productions are not entirely fair likenesses—though his earlier “poets are liars” is a statement of caveat lector that may relieve him of any need to strive for objectivity. Whether or not the likenesses are fair, they have lasted—and in a sense they have actually triumphed over more faithfully rendered portraits. Byron's gift of words is such that readers who know Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to have been less than adequately portrayed in these lines, who even understand in just what ways the quoted passages fall short of doing justice to the maligned trio and their poetic productions, may still think of the Lakers in Byron's vivid phrases and images. A great poet's lies (or contorted truths) do put ideas in other heads, Don Juan again serving down the ages as the best practical demonstration of the theoretical truth it asserts.

The indignant eloquence directed against Wordsworth and company will ring truer still if the reader is favorably disposed toward its speaker. Thus the beautiful and often discussed “Ave Maria!” stanzas (DJ 3.102-9), which in some ways seem at odds with the bitterly contemptuous denunciation that precedes them, can be seen as a useful phase in the complex argument that constitutes Don Juan's chief parabasis. Byron has just shown himself able to hit hard and aim well—now he seems to soften and strategically reveals his romantic and idealistic side, his best weapon against those “casuists” who “are pleased to say, / In nameless print—that I have no devotion” (DJ 3.104). Wit is not exactly banished from this charming interlude, which so movingly portrays the hour of prayer and love as Byron experienced it with Teresa Guiccioli in the Ravenna pines; but sentiment and apparently candid self-revelation take center stage. The reader, especially if familiar with details of Byronic biography, is made to sympathize with the narrator. Once that sympathy is achieved the artful speaker, as if embarrassed at his uncharacteristic lapse into honest emotion, takes refuge in facetiousness: “But I'm digressing,” he says,

Sure my invention must be down at zero,
          And I grown one of many “wooden spoons”
Of verse (the name with which we Cantabs please
To dub the last of honours in degrees).

(DJ 3.110)

If anything, this retreat heightens the compliment implied in the intimacy of the “Ave Maria!” interlude—and just as that earlier section flatters the reader who appreciates the biographical aptness of its details, so this passage builds on what is implied to be common ground. The reader, as if a favored fellow alumnus cantabrigensis, feels complicity with Byron when relied on to understand university slang and classical terms and concepts (passim, Ποιητικηs, and the Aristotelian party line on poetic length), when privileged to hear that the one long canto has been “too epic” and will be cut in two, when flattered with the confidence that “They'll never find it out, unless I own / The fact, excepting an experienced few.” As the canto closes and the parabasis enters its last phase, true confessions curtailed at just the right moment and “old boy” consensus blended of antics and esoterics prove superbly effective at ensuring that Byron, his narrator, and the reader stand together as a community of the cultivated—amateur classicists against corrupt moderns, cosmopolites against yokels, a discerning “we” against an imperceptive “they.”

Thus when the introductory generalizations on intellectual pride and how experience chastens it have begun canto 4 very effectively indeed (despite the fact that there is “Nothing so difficult as a beginning”), the narrator speaks from Byron's personal viewpoint—a vantage point made highly sympathetic to the reader in the closing stanzas of canto 3. The tone is serious without being heavy. Wit and pertinent allusion serve, as they so often do in Don Juan, to make us smile even as we recognize sober truth:

As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow,
          And wish'd that others held the same opinion;
They took it up when my days grew more mellow,
          And other minds acknowledged my dominion:
Now my sere fancy “falls into the yellow
          Leaf,” and imagination droops her pinion,
And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.

4

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
          'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,
'Tis that our nature cannot always bring
          Itself to apathy.

(DJ 4.3-4)

These lines sing out “He is an Englishman” almost as clearly as if they were W. S. Gilbert's song to that effect. The barding—the professed attempt at the national stiff upper lip (failure at complete stoicism being permissible because the speaker is a poet, hence an Englishman of feeling)—the apt mythological reference to Thetis dipping Achilles in the Styx that follows the quoted lines—all are appropriate to the voice of the expatriate Cantab who closed canto 3. That cosmopolite now launches into metapoetic commentary, elegantly making his defense of Don Juan, like his attack on Wordsworth's art, an integral part of the poem. The following stanzas clearly indicate the responsive nature of Don Juan:

Some have accused me of a strange design
          Against the creed and morals of the land,
And trace it in this poem every line:
          I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine,
          But the fact is that I have nothing plann'd,
Unless it were to be a moment merry,
A novel word in my vocabulary.

6

To the kind reader of our sober clime
          This way of writing will appear exotic;
Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme,
          Who sang when chivalry was more Quixotic,
And revell'd in the fancies of the time,
          True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, kings despotic;
But all these, save the last, being obsolete,
I chose a modern subject as more meet.

7

How I have treated it, I do not know;
          Perhaps no better than they have treated me
Who have imputed such designs as show
          Not what they saw, but what they wish'd to see;
But if it gives them pleasure, be it so,
          This is a liberal age, and thoughts are free.

(DJ 4.5-7)

Byron's sensitivity to British criticism—and the previously published cantos 1 and 2 had provoked plenty of it—is evident in his pose of offhandedness. But the self-deprecation is also a strategy for retaining the sympathies of the implied reader. After suggesting that Wordsworth is pompous and abstruse, yet dogmatic and provincial, Byron is at pains to avoid the appearance of putting on side. He must convey the impression of modesty, lucidity, tolerance, intense and wide experience—traits that will aid him in his desire to please the cosmopolitan reader, broaden the insular one (that cultural imperialist whose habit of dealing with “exotic” modes and matters is to domesticate them, as the poem's rhyme here has done with the word Quixotic) and speak convincingly to both of timely matters—false knights (and baronets and lords), dissolute ladies, pygmies who fancy themselves gigantic, and of course “kings despotic.” All Europe may provide examples for this “half-serious” poem, all continents and subsequent ages may ultimately furnish readers, but the immediate English audience is the one Byron can move in a manner he can calculate and toward ends he can envision. That “kind reader of our sober clime” must be made willing to accept the narrator's home truths.

Accordingly, Don Juan's associative arabesques typically establish connections between English things, words, situations, and practices and corresponding matter drawn from the wide world beyond. Sometimes English tastes or values are normative, as in canto 3 and 4, where the ordeals of shipwreck and marooning illustrate Don Juan's (and all humanity's) basic need for food and drink. “Ceres and Bacchus” take all forms in these cantos: we see nearstarvation, cannibalism, restorative seaside breakfasts in the island cave, and finally the exquisite delights of a banquet. Byron subtly but persistently connects all this feast and famine with the reader's prosaic world of eating and drinking. His means is repeated mention of those stereotypical English favorites tea and beef.¹⁶

Similarly, when in canto 5 Don Juan finds himself surrounded by and bedecked in unfamiliar Oriental splendor, distinctively British words or comparisons keep the reader from being drugged by the opiate of mere exotic description. When Juan, disguised as a harem girl, trips on his petticoat, Byron uses the so-called tyranny of rhyme to justify his employing a Scots vernacular pronoun: “whilk” instead of “which”—a choice he repeats in unrhymed position at the start of the next stanza: “Whilk, which (or what you please)” (DJ 5.77-78). The palace's massive portals may be guarded by implike dwarf-mutes, but the doors have hinges “smooth as Rogers' rhymes” (DJ 5.89). Juan's uncritical admiration of the “strange saloon” that lies behind the doors brings up a critical issue—the Horatian matter of nil admirari—that Byron makes peculiarly English, and peculiarly his own, by pinning a particular British identity (that of his publisher) on his reader, casting the matter in terms of English literature, and transforming the translation:

“Not to admire is all the art I know
          (Plain truth, dear Murray, needs few flowers of speech)
To make men happy, or to keep them so;
          (So take it in the very words of Creech).”
Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago;
          And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach
From his translation; but had none admired,
Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

(DJ 5.101)

When Don Juan balks at kissing the sultana's foot, the narrator stresses that the specifics may be foreign but the general situation is not: “There's nothing in the world like etiquette / In kingly chambers or imperial halls, / As also at the race and county balls” (DJ 5.103). And when Juan spurns the sultana's advances (surely an alien adventure for most readers) Byron directly asks that her wrath be imagined in terms of an experience more familiar in Regency society:

          Ye! who have kept your chastity when young,
While some more desperate dowager has been waging
          Love with you, and been in the dog-days stung
By your refusal, recollect her raging!

(DJ 5.130)

The convergence of cultures achieved by intellectual and verbal arabesques of this sort does not merely alert Byron's fellow Britons to the home truths pointed out by Juan's international escapades—it also enriches passages concerned with primarily British matters. A five-stanza digression on bluestockings, where an elaborately false tone of regret masks Byron's real disappointment that female readers failed to appreciate “Donny Johnny” (DJ 4.108-12), nicely illustrates this point.¹⁷ Here, “Oh!” “Ah!” and other exclamations alternate with rhetorical questions in a mock-mournful address to the no-longer “benign ceruleans of the second sex” (DJ 4.108). Byron is up to his old tricks of combining pseudobiographical recollection (“What, can I prove ‘a lion’ then no more?” “I know one woman of that purple school, / The loveliest, chastest, best, but—quite a fool”), literary quotation, misquotation, and allusion (bringing in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Southey), and witty reference to scientific developments (the cyanometer, a contrivance seemingly well-named for measuring the “intensity of blue” in each learned lady). But the passage's most brilliant effect involves superimposing a mythic past on the literary coteries Byron remembered from his Years of Fame following the publication of Childe Harold:

What, must I go to the oblivious cooks?
          Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks?
Ah! must I then the only minstrel be,
Proscribed from tasting your Castalian tea!

(DJ 4.108)

Along with lining portmanteaus, wrapping pastries was a fate for which literary works gone aground were destined in Byron's day—so the cooks are not only themselves “oblivious” to the merits of Don Juan, they also act to promote its oblivion in the wider world. There is considerable delight in seeing Byron's skill at fusing Parnassus, the inland mountain of Apollo and the Muses, with the rocky coast of Cornwall, so deadly to ships, then blending the Cornish pillagers of shipwrecks with the metropolitan purveyors of Cornish pasties and other baked goods. The hybrid phrase “Castalian tea” adds further refinements. The idea of brewing tea for salon frequenters from the waters of the Parnassian spring Castalia suggests, as does “Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks,” a distinctively English debasement of something sacred—a sacrilege both literally and symbolically appropriate to the circumstances. But because the name Castalia commemorates a nymph who flung herself into the spring as she fled from the embraces of Apollo, this phrase has the further advantage of pertaining to the human relationship here being deplored, the shrinking of fastidious literary nymphs from the robust delights Byron/Apollo has offered them in Don Juan. Lest this last significance escape a reader whose grasp of Greek geography is inadequate to the occasion, Byron offers a second chance at the insight in his digression's final line: “Oh, Lady Daphne! let me measure you!” (DJ 4.112). Here, the coldly virtuous nymph is the one who avoided Apollo's importunities by becoming a bay tree, with foliage subsequently sacred to the god and coveted by his followers the poets. Like brewing tea from Castalian water, Byron's metamorphosing Daphne into an English nobleman's daughter diminishes what was purely mythic. At the same time, such linkage can be seen as exalting what was merely mundane. The Great World where Byron is no longer the darling of Lady Daphne and her kind is nothing so great when compared with the realm of Apollo, but the fact that the two spheres can be compared increases Regency England's appeal. Again, though, it is the cosmopolitan, the habitué of both worlds, who must make the connection.

In each of the cases so far examined, introducing English matters to Don Juan has involved a sort of parabasis, and thus has carried us, however momentarily, out of the fictive world in which the narrative has been unfolding. But Byron had at his disposal two “dramatic” means of bringing such matters in, of taking up English phenomena without suspending the tale. One way, transporting Don Juan to England, will be the subject of the next chapter. The other way, bringing an English person into Don Juan, is what Byron chose to do at the start of canto 5, as Juan finds himself part of the slave market's international merchandise. Also there for sale is John Johnson, whose likeness to Southey's “Newbury Renegado” and whose role in persuading Don Juan to enact the role of Juanna have already been mentioned. This estimable fellow becomes Don Juan's, if not Don Juan's, introduction to the English character and the values and behavior that comprise it.

The extraordinarily ordinary English name John Johnson suggests, among other things, that its possessor will be a representative figure. Johnson's appearance is correspondingly that of a good English type:

          A man of thirty, rather stout and hale,
With resolution in his dark gray eye,
Next Juan stood, till some might choose to buy.

11

He had an English look; that is, was square
          In make, of a complexion white and ruddy,
Good teeth, with curling rather dark brown hair,
          And, it might be from thought, or toil, or study,
An open brow a little mark'd with care.

(DJ 5.10-11)

Cecil Y. Lang convincingly argues that this description affectionately portrays Byron's boxing master from bygone days, that John Johnson is based on his near-namesake “Gentleman” John Jackson.¹⁸ The details of Johnson's appearance also tally in a general way with Byron's own looks when his health was sound (though the matter of “good teeth” may have been wishful thinking—his letters from Italy remind English friends to send “Waite's red tooth powder” with a persistence that suggests some anxiety). Johnson's cool attitude toward his former wives, at which we looked in the second essay, is, like the dental superiority, a quality Byron would be glad to have—or to have attributed to him. The premature pose of world-weariness and the ability to view his own plight with detachment and humor are Byronic features we by this point in the poem have learned to recognize as equally characteristic of the narrator. In fact Johnson turns out to be, like Byron and the narrator, an exemplary specimen of the contemporary English philosopher as delineated in chapter 6 of England and the English, no systematic idealist but a practical student of conduct in a material world.¹⁹ The congruence between Johnson's perspective and the narrator's becomes evident early in canto 5, where Johnson, whose cynicism does not prevent him from making the best of circumstances, tries to comfort Juan with these words of wisdom:

“But after all, what is our present state?
          'Tis bad, and may be better—all men's lot:
Most men are slaves, none more so than the great,
          To their own whims and passions, and what not.”

(DJ 5.25)

Two stanzas later the narrator is generalizing about the pleasure of “purchasing our fellow creatures” in much the same way:

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

(DJ 5.27)

As these similar observations suggest, the worldly English empiricist Johnson embodies a certain side of the Byronic narrator, though that narrator is of course a much more complex and intriguing entity. By dint of his presence in the fictive world of the poem, Johnson is able to impart some of his and the narrator's shared practical wisdom to Don Juan. And Juan sorely needs it, for, paradoxically, his life as choice-making creature has begun with his enslavement. His previous “choices” have been variously determined—by instinct and sentiment (affairs with Julia and Haidée), internalized code (courageous endurance of shipwreck, rash defiance of Lambro), biological necessity (reliance on Haidée's nurturing, resistance to the “bella donna” on the slave ship), or mixtures of these impulses. Now, in Constantinople, Juan is stripped of his former social identity yet put into social situations calling for more difficult decisions than his previous experience has offered. As Bunyan supplied Faithful and Hopeful to help Pilgrim through the tight spots of his Progress, so Byron provides Don Juan with a comrade whose attributes, if assimilated, will help him deal with the new challenges of increasingly adult experience.

John Johnson proves himself indispensable to Juan on three occasions, in situations that ascend in complexity. As Baba conducts the purchased Europeans through the imperial precincts, young man's bravado spurs Juan to suggest that he and Johnson “knock that old black fellow on the head” and make their escape. Here (DJ 5.44), Johnson's simple reminder of realities suffices to correct Juan's course. Having bashed the eunuch, how would they get out? And how would getting out improve their situation? And anyway, why make any attempts before getting the badly needed sustenance of a meal?

When the two enslaved Westerners face further threats to their identities in the Turkish costumes Baba chooses for them and the circumcision he recommends (DJ 5.67-69), Johnson's prudence instructs Juan through example. The matter of circumcision raised by Baba evokes Johnson's cagiest courtesy and provokes an intemperate explosion from Juan. The stanzas presenting their responses offers telling contrast of temperaments. Johnson, significantly, manages to have the first and the last word:

For his own share—he saw but small objection
          To so respectable an ancient rite;
And, after swallowing down a slight refection,
          For which he own'd a present appetite,
He doubted not a few hours of reflection
          Would reconcile him to the business quite.
“Will it?” said Juan, sharply; “Strike me dead,
But they as soon shall circumcise my head!

72

“Cut off a thousand heads, before———”—“Now, pray,”
          Replied the other, “do not interrupt:
You put me out in what I had to say.
          Sir!—as I said, as soon as I have supt,
I shall perpend if your proposal may
          Be such as I can properly accept;
Provided always your great goodness still
Remits the matter to our own free-will.”

(DJ 5.71-72)

Johnson's diplomatic evasiveness demonstrates to Juan, always impetuous and often naive but not stupid, that a manly man need not always face coercion with direct resistance. It is Johnson's example rather than Baba's threats, I think, that leads Juan to acquiesce in his temporary transformation to Juanna. With “some slight oaths” here, some sighs there, tugs, trips, and other awkwardnesses, Juan deliberately shows that he is neither accustomed to nor pleased by putting on female apparel. But by the time the disguise is complete, he has entered into the game with the good grace that is always wise when opposition is fruitless. Johnson, rightly reading Juan's change of mood, parts from him with mixed advice and badinage; and Juan has become enough like his practical mentor to return the volley in his new and temporary character:

“We needs must follow [says Johnson] when Fate puts from shore.
          Keep your good name; though Eve herself once fell.”
“Nay,” quoth the maid, “the Sultan's self shan't carry me,
Unless his highness promises to marry me.”

(DJ 5.84)

In the preceding situations, Johnson's values clearly were suited to effecting a satisfactory outcome. But the Englishman's material philosophy will not suffice to handle everything Fate presents, as is evident in canto 8 when, on the battlefield of Ismail, Juan rescues Leila, a beautiful Turkish child. Though both Juan and Johnson are gentlemen, as Johnson immediately recognized in the slave market (DJ 5.13), and both are soldiers of fortune for the present time, they look at the problem posed by the act of rescue from different places on the human continuum. Here, as before, Don Juan shows himself hobbled by lofty ideals—but this time Johnson's pragmatism will not, unalloyed, answer the needs of the moment.

Fighting against his own comrades, the Cossacques, to save a child of the enemy is chivalrous instinct on Juan's part. When he has foiled the child's assailants, Juan gazes into her eyes and sees her with his heart, which responds with “pain, pleasure, hope, fear, mixed / With joy to save, and dread of some mischance / Unto his protégée” (DJ 8.96). What he sees and how he feels combine to give Juan, at this highly inconvenient moment, one of his most soberly responsible impulses in the whole poem. He vows to suffer anything for Leila's safety: “‘At least I will endure / Whate'er is to be borne—but not resign / This child, who is parentless and therefore mine’” (DJ 8.100). “Borne” is interestingly double here—if read as “born” it suggests acceptance not merely of the humane responsibilities implicit in “protégeé” but of parenthood's added burdens. And like a loving parent, Juan accepts more responsibility for her than any mortal can actually take for another: “‘I saved her—must not leave / Her life to chance’” (DJ 8.99). Though he has only just encountered the girl and in spite of the fact that he is in the midst of slaughtering her countrymen, he vows to cherish her existence above his own: “‘I'll not quit her till she seems secure / Of present life a good deal more than we’” (DJ 8.100). Such an attachment, instantly formed, unrealistic in its aim, and inconsistent with Juan's present role and situation, is clearly emotional rather than reasonable.

Avowing his new responsibilities, Juan calls on Johnson to “‘Look / Upon this child’” (DJ 8.99). The older man sees Leila with his eyes, not his heart, and accordingly perceives her youth and beauty, not the attendant associations that have won Juan's allegiance. The child's physical attributes alone are not enough to distract Johnson from his present pursuit of victory and the booty that goes with it:

…—“Juan, we've no time to lose;
          The child's a pretty child—a very pretty—
I never saw such eyes—but hark! now choose
          Between your fame and feelings, pride and pity”

(DJ 8.101)

In the last line quoted, the narrator characterizes the alternatives presented to Johnson's lucid Augustan mind in witty, alliterative pairings of the sort now most famous from Jane Austen titles: “fame and feelings,” “pride and pity.” Choosing between such alternatives will not be not a simple matter for Johnson, who has by no means enlisted in the ranks of those he earlier called “the world's stoics—men without a heart,” the purely material creatures who have learned that “To feel for none is the true social art” (DJ 5.25). As an empiricist, Johnson slights the importance of neither fame nor feelings, neither pride nor pity—but the way he balances the conflicting claims clearly shows which have primacy: “‘I should be loth to march without you, but, / By God! we'll be too late for the first cut’” (DJ 8.101).

The shared act of looking at Leila and the different reactions to that look epitomize Juan's and Johnson's contrasting perspectives on the world and reveal the blind spots hampering each viewpoint. Juan has strong, proper feelings but is incapable of translating them into reasonable action; Johnson shows willingness to make the expedient choice without heeding higher claims. The solution either man would reach alone is unpalatable. Juan would perversely give up fame, fortune, and perhaps his life to save a child whose safety would in no way be guaranteed by his sacrifice. Johnson, having eschewed ordinary morality in the special arena of battle, would succumb to ordinary cupidity—a debasing decision, for although in the brutal panorama of war one life may mean little, one man's share of the booty means infinitely less. But when Johnson's rational and Juan's emotional approaches combine rather than oppose one another, a solution satisfactory on emotional, moral, and pragmatic grounds becomes possible. Emotion serves as catalyst to this solution, but reason is chief agent. Faced with an “immovable” Juan, Johnson, “who really loved him in his way” (DJ 8.102), comes up with a practical plan of action that will allow him to have his own way while respecting Juan's feelings. The Englishman

Picked out amongst his followers with some skill
          Such as he thought the least given up to prey;
And swearing if the infant came to ill
          That they should be all shot on the next day;
But, if she were delivered safe and sound,
They should at least have fifty roubles round.

(DJ 8.102)

Johnson's way of love is certainly different from Juan's—it is reasonable love, a partially unemotional emotion, yet another of the poem's many demonstrations that strength can reside in mixture or impurity. Johnson's skill in reading his followers and in recognizing that Juan cannot be talked out of his attachment to the Turkish child comes from gauging heads and hearts, then selecting the tools (here, threats and bribes mixed with assurance of justice) best suited to move them to his ends. Ironically, Johnson's blend of warm regard for Juan, sangfroid, and cold cash makes for the success of Juan's noble gesture.

In the resolution of this dilemma we see that a truly resourceful person would combine, as Johnson comes to do, the natures (which is also to say the moral nationalities) of Don Juan and John Johnson—and the names suggest as much. Juan is literally the Spanish John—hot, emotional, acting on instinct. Johnson is the English Juan—cool, rational, acting on intention. Each sort needs some attributes of the other for physical and spiritual survival in a world larger than either one's native country. Each, in effect, needs to be a cosmopolite. Just as Juan without Johnson's reason to guide him and Johnson without Juan's feelings to consider can be seen as at or near the ends of human nature's continuum, so the world in which Don Juan is traveling seems to have gradations of climate enclosed by extremes. Juan's origin, Spain, is hot and emotional as he is. Johnson's origin (and Juan's final destination in the poem as we have it), England, is the proper sphere of calculation and money, cold in climate and temperament, as the narrator is fond of stressing. Traveling between these extremes, Juan increasingly comes to need Johnson's particular strengths—for the passage from Spain to Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England (and like it the journey from boyhood's end at sixteen to young manhood at twenty-one) is progressively chilly in moral terms, ever less the realm of the heart and more the kingdom of the head.

Though Juan can take on some of John Johnson's practical wisdom, that material philosophy for which the English mind of Byron's day showed itself well adapted, he remains essentially different from his mentor. The difference is partly a matter of nationality, partly a function of age. But most crucially it is, like the difference between the “good” poets and the “bad” ones discussed earlier, a consequence of two distinct varieties of mobility, contrasting types offering one representation of what, for Lilian Furst, is “a central axis of the irony” in Don Juan—“the tension between spontaneity and self-consciousness.”²⁰ Like Southey's “Newbury Renegado,” Johnson, whether in the palace or on the field of battle, is able to see possibilities and make choices, his keen eye always looking for the path of least resistance, his intellect unprejudiced by a strong moral or emotional stance. Juan's way is not so much to choose as to react to his environment, to take on the color of his surroundings without assessing the implications of his position. As we have seen, he can be convinced to change his course when such a change does not conflict with his feelings, but (with the notable exception of his stint of female impersonation) he does not seem able to come independently to that choice. Once convinced to take any course of action, Juan becomes the new character he plays, his mind undistracted by alternatives. At Ismail, for example, once Johnson has devised the acceptable scheme for saving Leila, Juan will “march on through thunder” (DJ 8.103) and give over his energies to fighting with the same intensity that only moments earlier animated his newly embraced paternal role. His manner of fighting, however, indicates that Johnson's practical approach has not yet become part of his character. Like his Cossacque comrades, Juan is moved by impulse rather than strategy to spare a “brave Tartar Khan” and his five brave sons (DJ 8.104-6), then to assail these admirable enemies with renewed ferocity when the hopelessly outnumbered band refuses mercy (DJ 8.107-19).

Thus even when they partake of one another's natural and national influences, Johnson and Juan do not become identical cosmopolites. For good and for ill, Johnson is a finished being—self-propelled, self-directed, consciously manipulative. Within limits, Juan is an evolving and maturing personality. As the poem goes on, we shall see that he becomes more calculating but never down-right Johnsonian, though as he moves toward the country-house heart of England, ever farther from his native climate and into an increasingly alien one, the roles he lives call more and more for cool, rational, worldly sense. As Don Juan's last cantos unfold, Johnson is no longer physically with him, but Juan survives and prospers because he has subsumed something of the older man and the culture he represents. Don Juan's England as we shortly shall see it is very much Johnson's country. Only a Juan who is also part Johnson—a Schlegelian “cultivated man” who like the composing poet and his projected narrator is able to see, feel, and think—can hope to make his way in such a world.

Notes

1. Peter Manning, “Don Juan and Byron's Imperceptiveness to the English Word,” Studies in Romanticism 18, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 232.

2. Gilbert Norwood, Greek Comedy (London: Methuen, 1931), 11-12. For more on parabasis, see ibid., 59, 239; Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 597-98; Anne Mellor, English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17-18. G. M. Sifakis's monograph Parabasis and Animal Choruses (London: Athlone Press, 1971) deals with parabasis on pp. 7-70.

3. Mellor, English Romantic Irony, 17; Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne, 1970), 62.

4. I have surveyed some two dozen readers on this matter.

5. See McGann's Notes to Don Juan, 692. Visiting Rome in 1817, Byron had found the perfect image of Lady Adelaide: “The Apollo Belvidere is the image of Lady Adelaide Forbes—I think I never saw such a likeness” (LJ 5:227). According to chronology, of course, the real Regency beauty would have to be the “image” of the classical sculpture.

6. Claptrap, a word whose earliest citation in the OED dates from 1727, refers to a device or expression employed to gain applause, as Byron saw Coleridge's German metaphysics, Wordsworth's Note to “The Thorn,” The Excursion's “new system to perplex the sages,” and the Lakers' mutual admiration attempting to do. Both the thing and the word claptrap come from spectacular theater—in fact, the OED's second cited usage of the word is in Dibdin's Musical Tour (lxiii. 461) (see The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989]).

7. For a good example of Byron's delight in cultural contrast see LJ 5:129-32, Byron's letter of 17 November 1816, to Moore.

8. The idea of intentional, unresolvable doubleness of voice is explored in “Heteroglossia in the Novel,” pages 301-31 of Bakhtin's long essay “Discourse in the Novel,” which appears in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422. Bakhtin sees such doubleness as an essential feature of prose (and especially the novel) rather than poetry—and its presence in Don Juan seems yet another indication that this “poem” embodies at all levels the cosmopolitan principle of mixed values.

9. Malcolm Kelsall, Byron's Politics (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), 156-58.

10. Jerome McGann too sees Byron along with Southey in the “sad trimmer” of “The isles of Greece!”: see “Byron, Mobility, and the Poetics of Historical Ventriloquism,” Romanticism Past and Present 9, no. 1 (1985): 74-76.

11. Kelsall, Byron's Politics, 157.

12. McGann's impressive and concise gloss on these allusions is to be found in Don Juan, 701-3.

13. See McGann, Notes to Don Juan, 694.

14. John Cam Hobhouse, Byron's Bulldog: The Letters of John Cam Hobhouse to Lord Byron, ed. Peter W. Graham (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 259.

15. See McGann, Notes to Don Juan, 702, and LJ 4:324-25.

16. Eight of Don Juan's eleven references to beef, that English indispensable, occur in the shipwreck canto: see DJ 2.13, 47, 67, 153, 154, 155, 156 (twice). Tea is mentioned once in this canto (stanza 145) and at two key points in canto 4. In stanza 52, “the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea” seems to be controlling Don Juan's destiny by making the narrator, who is drinking that beverage, “grow pathetic.” Stanza 108 alludes to “Castalian tea,” a matter discussed in the body of this essay.

17. See, for instance, LJ 6:237 (29 October 1819, to Hoppner) and 7:202 (12 October 1820, to Murray).

18. Cecil Y. Lang, “Narcissus Jilted: Byron, Don Juan, and the Biographical Imperative,” in Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 154.

19. Edward G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, ed. Standish Meacham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 314-21.

20. Lilian R. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony in European Narrative, 1760-1857 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 109.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations appear in parenthetical references in the text:

CPW	Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann
DJ	Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. Jerome J. McGann
G	Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, fascimile of the first edition, intro. James L. Ruff
LE	Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons
LJ	Lord Byron, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand
NC	Lady Caroline Lamb, A New Canto

Select Bibliography

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