The satire in Don Juan is still more remarkable when we consider the field which it surveys. Byron is no longer dealing with local topics, but with subjects of momentous interest to all humanity. He is assailing, not a small coterie of editors or an immodest dance, but a bigoted and absolute government, a hypocritical society, and, a false idealism, wherever they exist. More than this, he so succeeds in uniting his satire, through the force of his personality, with the eternal elements of realism and romance, that the combination, complex and intricate though it is, seems to represent an undivided purpose.
Perhaps the loftiest note in Byron’s protest is struck in dealing with the political situation of his day. Despite his noble birth and his aristocratic tastes, he had become, partly through temperamental inclination, partly through association with Moore and Hunt, a fairly consistent republican, though he took care to make it clear, as Nichol points out, that he was “for the people, not of them.” Impatient of restraint on his own actions, he extended his belief in personal liberty until it included the advocacy of any democratic movement. It is to his credit, moreover, that he was no mere closet theorist; in Italy he espoused the cause of freedom in a practical way by abetting and joining the revolutionary Carbonari; and he died enrolled in the ranks of the liberators of Greece. In Don Juan he declares himself resolutely opposed to tyranny in any form, asserting his hatred of despotism in memorable lines:
“I will teach, if possible, the stones
To rise against earth’s tyrants. Never let it
Be said that we still truckle unto thrones.”[288]
Such doctrine was, of course, not new in Byron’s poetry. He had already spoken eloquently and mournfully of the loss of Greek independence[289]; he had prophesied the downfall of monarchs and the triumph of democracy[290]; and he had inserted in Childe Harold that vigorous apostrophe to liberty:
“Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner, torn but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.”[291]
In Don Juan, however, Byron is less rhetorical and more direct. In expressing his
“Plain sworn downright detestation