Pisa and Don Juan.
No such friendship as that whose gleams have shot athwart these latter pages could have been kindled by Byron. No “Adonais” could have been writ for him; he could have melted into no “Adonais” for another; old pirate blood, seething in him, forbade. No wonder he chafed at Hunt’s squalling children in the Lanfranchi palace; that literary partnership finds quick dissolution. He sees on rare occasions an old English friend—he, who has so few! Yet he is in no mood to make new friends. The lambent flames of the Guiccioli romance hover and play about him, making the only counterfeit of a real home which he has ever known. The proud, independent, audacious, lawless living that has been his so long, whether the early charms lie in it or no—he still clings by. His pen has its old force, and the words spin from it in fiery lines; but to pluck the flowers worth the seeking, which he plants in them now, one must go over quaking bogs, and through ways of foulness.
The Childe Harold has been brought to its conclusion long before; its cantos, here and there splendidly ablaze with Nature—its storms, its shadows, its serenities; and the sentiment—now morbid, now jubilant—is always his own, though it beguiles with honeyed sounds, or stabs like a knife.
There have been a multitude of lesser poems, and of dramas which have had their inception and their finish on that wild Continental holiday—beginning on Lac Leman and ending at Pisa and Genoa; but his real selfhood—whether of mind or passion—seems to me to come out plainer and sharper in the Don Juan than elsewhere. There may not be lifts in it, which rise to the romantic levels of the “Pilgrimage;” there may be lack of those interpolated bits of passion, of gloom, of melancholy, which break into the earlier poem. But there is the blaze and crackle of his own mad march of flame; the soot, the cinders, the heat, the wide-spread ashes, and unrest of those fires which burned in him from the beginning were there, and devastated all the virginal purities of his youth (if indeed there were any!) and welded his satanic and his poetic qualities into that seamy, shining, wonderful residue of dirty scoriæ, and of brilliant phosphorescence, which we call Don Juan. From a mere literary point of view there are trails of doggerel in it, which the poet was too indolent to mend, and too proud to exclude. Nor can it ever be done; a revised Byron would be not only a Byron emasculated, but decapitated and devastated. ’Twould lack the links that tie it to the humanities which coil and writhe tortuously all up and down his pages. His faults of prosody, or of ethics, or of facts—his welter, at intervals, through a barren splendor of words—are all typical of that fierce, proud, ungovernable, unconventional nature. This leopard will and should carry all his spots. We cannot shrive the man; no chanters or churches can do this; he disdains to be shriven at human hands, or, it would seem, any other hands. The impact of that strong, vigorous nature—through his poems—brings, to the average reader, a sense of force, of brilliancy, of personality, of humanity (if gone astray), which exhilarates, which dashes away a thousand wordy memories of wordy verses, and puts in their place palpitating phrases that throb with life. An infinite capability for eloquent verse; an infinite capability for badnesses! We cannot root out the satanry from the man, or his books, any more than we can root out Lucifer from Milton’s Eden. But we can lament both, and, if need be, fight them.
Whether closer British influence (which usually smote upon him, like sleet on glass)—even of that “Ancient Oratory” of Annesley—would have served to whiten his tracks, who shall say? Long ago he had gone out from them, and from parish church and sermon; his hymns were the Ranz des Vaches on the heights of the Dent de Jaman, and the preachments he heard were the mellowed tones of convent bells—filtering through forest boughs—maybe upon the ear of some hapless Allegra, scathed by birth-marks of a sin that is not her own—conning her beads, and listening and praying!