This is no place for discussing the fundamental morality or immorality of Don Juan. The British public of Byron’s day, basing their judgment largely upon the voluptuousness of certain love scenes and upon some coarse phrases scattered here and there through the poem, charged him with “brutally outraging all the best feeling of humanity.” There can be no doubt that Byron did ignore the ordinary standards of conduct among average people; though he asserted “My object is Morality,”[321] no one knew better than he that he was constantly running counter to the conventional code of behavior. Nor can any one doubt, after a study of his letters to Murray and Moore, that he felt a sardonic glee in acting as an agent of disillusion and pretending to be a very dangerous fellow. This spirit led him to employ profanity in Don Juan until his friend Hobhouse protested: “Don’t swear again—the third ‘damn.’”[322] By assailing many things that his time held sacred, by calling love “selfish in its beginning as its end,”[323] and maintaining that the desire for money is “the only sort of pleasure that requites,”[324] Byron drew upon himself the charge of immorality. The poem, however, does not attempt to justify debauchery or to defend vicious practices; Byron is attacking not virtue, but false sentiment, false idealism, and false faith. His satiric spirit is engaged in analyzing and exposing the strange contradictions and contrasts in human life, in tearing down what is sham and pretence and fraud. Judged from this standpoint, Don Juan is profoundly moral.
Fortunately, in this poem the design of which was to exploit the doctrine of personal freedom, Byron had discovered a medium through which he could make his individuality effective, in which he could speak in the first person, leave off his story when he chose, digress and comment on current events, and voice his every mood and whim. The colloquial tone of the poem strikes the reader at once. He censures himself in a jocular way for letting the tale slip forever through his fingers, and confesses with mock humility,
“If I have any fault, it is digression.”[325]
The habit of calling himself back to the narrative becomes almost as much of an idiosyncrasy as Mr. Kipling’s “But that is another story.”[326] Obviously Byron’s words are really no more than half-apologetic; he knew perfectly well what he was doing and why he was doing it. Without insisting too much on the value of a mathematical estimate it is still safe to say that Don Juan is fully half-concerned with that sort of gossipy chat with which Byron’s visitors at Venice or Pisa were entertained,[327] and as the poem lengthened, his tendency was to neglect the plot more and more. Indeed the justification for treating Don Juan as a satire lies mainly in these side-remarks in which Byron discloses his thoughts and opinions with so little reserve. The digressions in the poem are used principally for two purposes: to satirize directly people, institutions, or theories; to gossip about the writer himself. In either case we may imagine Byron as a monologist, telling us what he has done and what he is going to do, what he has seen and heard, what he thinks on current topics, and illustrating points here and there by a short anecdote or a compact maxim. In such a series of observations, extending as they do over a number of years and written as they were under rapidly shifting conditions, it is uncritical to demand unity. We might as well expect to find a model drama in a diary. The important fact is that we have in these digressions a continuous exposition of Byron’s satire during the most important years of his life.
The peculiar features of the octave stanza, with its opportunity for double and triple rhymes and the loose structure of its sestette, made it more suited to Byron’s genius than the more compact and less flexible heroic couplet. At the same time the concluding couplet of the octave offered him a chance for brief and epigrammatic expression. In general it may be said that no metrical form lends itself more readily to the colloquial style which Byron preferred than does the octave.
In utilizing this stanza, Byron, accepting the methods of Pulci and Casti, allowed himself the utmost liberties in rhyming and verse-structure. We have already seen that in several youthful poems, and, indeed, in some later ephemeral verses, he had shown a fondness for remarkable rhymes. By the date of Beppo he had broken away entirely from the rigidity of the Popean theory of poetry, and had confessed that he enjoyed a freer style of writing:
“I—take for rhyme, to hook my rambling verse on,
The first that Walker’s lexicon unravels,
And when I can’t find that, I put a worse on,
Not caring as I ought for critics’ cavils.”[328]