When marriage, then, is so unalluring, the logical refuge is an honest friendship with a married lady, “of all connections the most steady.”[304] When Byron does speak of women with apparent respect, it is always well to search for irony behind. If he says, evidently with emotion:
“All who have loved, or love, will still allow
Life has nought like it. God is love, they say,
And love’s a god,”[305]
he qualifies his ecstacy elsewhere by asserting that Love is “the very God of evil.”[306] Although he protests that he loves the sex,[307] he must add that they are deceitful,[308] hypocritical,[309] and fickle.[310]
Nothing in the first two cantos of Don Juan was more offensive to Hobhouse and the “Utican Senate” to which Murray submitted them than the poorly disguised portrayal of Lady Byron in the character of Donna Inez. Though Byron explicitly disavowed all intention of satirising his wife directly, no one familiar with the facts could possibly have doubted that this lady “whose favorite science was the mathematical,” who opened her husband’s trunks and letters, and tried to prove her loving lord mad, and who acted under all circumstances like “Morality’s prim personification” was intended to represent the former Miss Milbanke and present Lady Byron.
Doubtless there is something artificial and affected in much of Byron’s cynical comment on women and love; but if we are inclined to distrust this man of many amours who delights in flaunting his past before the eyes of his shocked compatriots, we must remember that there is probably no conscious insincerity in his words. Byron frequently deludes not only his readers but himself, and his satire on women, when it is not a kind of bravado, is merely part of his worldly philosophy.
The philosophical conceptions on which Don Juan rests are, in their general trend, not uncommonly satirical; that is, they are destructive rather than constructive, skeptical rather than idealistic, founded on doubt rather than on faith. It is the object of the poem to overturn tottering institutions, to upset traditions, and to unveil illusions. Byron’s attitude is that so often taken by a thorough man of the world who has tasted pleasure to the point of satiety, and who has arrived at early middle age with his enthusiasms weakened and his faith sunk in pessimism. This accounts for much of the realism in the poem. Sometimes the poet, in the effort to portray things as they are, merely transcribes the prose narratives of others into verse,[311] just as Shakspere borrowed passages from North’s Plutarch for Julius Cæsar. More often he undertakes to detect and reveal the incongruity between actuality and pretence, and to expose weakness and folly under its mask of sham. The realism of this sort closely resembles the more modern work of Zola, attributing as it does even good actions to low motives and degrading deliberately the better impulses of mankind. In Byron’s case it seems to be the result partly of a wish to avoid carrying sentiment and romance to excess, partly of a distorted or partial view of life. Whatever romance there is in Don Juan—and the amount is not inconsiderable—is invariably followed by a drop into bathos or absurdity. The deservedly famous “Ave Maria,”[312] with its exquisite sentiment and melody, is closed by a stanza harsh and grating, which calls the reader with a shock back to a lower level. This juxtaposition of tenderness and mockery, tending by contrast to accentuate both moods, is highly characteristic of the spirit of the poem. Juan’s lament for Donna Julia is interrupted by sea-sickness,[313] and his rhetorical address on London, “Freedom’s chosen station,” is broken off by “Damn your eyes! your money or your life.”[314] Byron never overdoes the emotional element in Don Juan; he draws us back continually to the commonplace, and sometimes to the mean and vulgar.[315]
Byron’s materialistic and skeptical habit of mind is often put into phraseology that recalls the “Que sais-je?” of Montaigne. Rhetorical disquisitions on the vanity of human knowledge and of worldly achievement had appeared in Childe Harold[316]; in Don Juan the poet dismisses the great problems of existence with a jest:
“What is soul, or mind, their birth and growth,