On, or about, the same day, Shelley wrote from Ravenna about this same Canto of Don Juan, which he commended so highly to Mary, for its unqualified purity and surpassing beauty, to his friend Peacock:—
‘Lord Byron is in excellent cue both of health and spirits. He has got rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which he indulged at Venice. He lives with one woman, a lady of rank here, to whom he is attached, and who is attached to him, and is in every respect an altered man. He has written three more cantos of Don Juan. I have yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every word of it is pregnant with immortality. I have not seen his late plays except Marino Faliero, which is very well, but not so transcendently fine as the Don Juan.’
Let it be observed that, in the letter to his wife, Shelley alludes to the second Canto of Don Juan, and more especially to the end of it, as a piece of literature with which she is familiar. To demonstrate the excellence of the unpublished Canto he has just read in manuscript, Shelley assures Mary that, in its style, and the powerful ease with which it is sustained, it resembles the end of the second Canto,—i.e. the part of the poem which describes, with delicate and insidious suggestiveness, the mutual passion of Don Juan and Haidee in the cave. Is it to ‘insult the Shelleys’ (Mr. Froude’s pleasant phrase) to say that Shelley could not have thus referred to some of the sweetest and most voluptuous passages of the amorous poem, without knowing that Mary had perused them with enjoyment and approval? And what is the theme of the unpublished fifth Canto, which Shelley extols to his wife for bearing, in every word, ‘the stamp of immortality,’ and for containing ‘not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be cancelled?’ One of the wittiest and wickedest of the sixteen Cantos, this highly commended Canto contains the harem scene where Gulbeyaz vainly solicits Don Juan to minister to her lust. I do not wish to ‘insult the Shelleys,’ but I cannot conceive that Shelley would have written so approvingly of the Canto, had he not wished Mary to peruse this vicious and vitiating piece of Byronic devilry, and felt that it would please her to read how, in her desperate effort to conquer Don Juan’s coldness, Gulbeyaz, in an imperial way
‘laid
Her hand on his, and bending on him eyes,
Which needed not an empire to persuade,
Look’d into his for love....
... and pausing one chaste moment, threw
Herself upon his breast, and there she grew.’
On 14th September, 1821, Shelley wrote from Pisa to Horatio Smith, of Byron’s determination to write a series of dramas:—
‘This seems to me the wrong road; but genius like his is destined to lead and not to follow. He will shake off his shackles as he finds they cramp him. I believe he will produce something very great; and that familiarity with the dramatic forms of human nature, will soon enable him to soften down the severe and unharmonizing tints of his Marino Faliero.’
On 4th November, 1821, Shelley said to Edward Williams of Lord Byron’s Cain, ‘His Cain is second to nothing of the kind.’
(8)—From Pisa, Shelley wrote, in January, 1822, to John Gisborne of the poet, whom he idolized:—
‘What think you of Lord Byron now? Space wondered less at the swift and fair creations of God, when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body. So I think, let the world envy while it admires, as it may.’
(9)—On 10th April, 1822, when his relations with the great poet had been shaken and ruffled by gusts of discord, Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, ‘What think you of Lord Byron’s last volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since the publication of Paradise Regained. Cain is apocalyptic,—it is a revelation not before communicated to man.’